Science News
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PSYCHOLOGY.
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Dec 20, 06: If you think the innate talents of your child alone will produce the next Albert Einstein, think again. The real recipe for producing a bright-minded adult, according to a new study, calls for a few ingredients -—cognitive abilities, educational opportunities, interest, and plain old hard work.
. . The 35-year study tracked 5,000 mathematically gifted individuals throughout their lives, beginning at age 12. Success was measured by the number of patents earned, tenures secured at universities and income, among other factors.
. . “We found that mathematical gifts and a variety of aptitudes have a significant impact, but that special educational opportunities and commitment can dramatically increase this impact", said study co-author David Lubinski, a researcher at Vanderbilt University. “These students are intellectually gifted, and those gifts are best fully realized when they have the full support and understanding of their teachers, their parents and their social network.”
Dec 18, 06: It's not that they don't ponder the the potential consequences. In fact, a new study finds teens spend more time weighing risk than adults and in fact often overestimate the odds of a bad outcome. But the desire for acceptance among peers wins out in the decision-making process of a young mind. Cornell U researcher Valerie Reyna and Frank Farley of Temple U conducted a review of scientific studies on the topics.
. . Compared to adults, teens take about 170 milliseconds more weighing the pros and cons of engaging in high-risk behavior, the researchers conclude. Adults scarcely think about risk, perhaps because they think they recognize risk intuitively. Teens, on the other hand, take time to mull the risk vs. benefit equation. "In other words, more experienced decision-makers tend to rely more on fuzzy reasoning, processing situations and problems as gists [the essence of their actions] rather than weighing multiple factors", Reyna said.
. . Teens often decide that the benefits of risky behavior immediate gratification or peer acceptance—outweigh the risks, Reyna said. She figures its better to teach teens some "gist-based" thinking skills, such as putting risks into general categories rather than lecturing with specific data and details.
Dec 7, 06: Left-handed people can think quicker when carrying out tasks such as playing computer games or playing sport, say Australian researchers.
. . Connections between the left and right hand sides or hemispheres of the brain are faster in left-handed people, a study in Neuropsychology shows. The fast transfer of information in the brain makes left-handers more efficient when dealing with multiple stimuli. Experts said left-handers tended to use both sides of the brain more easily.
. . The researchers found that the more left-handed people were, the better they were at processing information across the two sides of the brain. Extreme left-handed individuals were 43 milliseconds faster at spotting matching letters across the right and left visual fields than right-handed people.
Dec 4, 06: [My worthless "dingbat" Univ --JFKU-- taught that there's no dif between Socio- & psycho-paths. I told them they were wrong, & they were. See our /dictnary.html ] There are biological brain differences that mark out psychopaths from other people, according to scientists. Psychopaths showed less activity in brain areas involved in assessing the emotion of facial expressions, the British Journal of Psychiatry reports. In particular, they were far less responsive to fearful faces than healthy volunteers.
. . Criminal psychopaths are people with aggressive and anti-social personalities who lack emotional empathy. They can commit hideous crimes, such as rape or murder, yet show no signs of remorse or guilt.
. . It has been suggested that people with psychopathic disorders lack empathy because they have defects in processing facial and vocal expressions of distress, such as fear and sadness, in others.
. . When processing fearful faces compared with neutral faces, the healthy volunteers showed increased activation and the psychopaths decreased activation in these brain regions. "These results suggest that the neural pathways for processing facial expressions of happiness are functionally intact in people with psychopathic disorder, although less responsive. "In contrast, fear is processed in a very different way."
. . This failure to recognize and emotionally respond to facial and other signals of distress may underlie psychopaths' failure to block behavior that causes distress in others and their lack of emotional empathy, the scientists suggest.
Nov 24, 06: [so it's true --we *do run out of room!] "Old dogs" may really find it hard to learn new tricks, a study of how memories form has suggested. Uof Oxford scientists say that adults may find learning more difficult than children because their brains store memories differently.
. . The study looked at nerve cell activity --the basis of learning and memory-- in rats. Experts said younger brains may learn things more easily, but older brains may store information more efficiently. They found that silent synapses are more prevalent in young brains, and are called on when new memories are laid down. When this happens, key receptors --which detect stimuli-- are called to the surface of the cell, transforming it into an active synapse.
. . In older brains, there were fewer silent synapses --which the researchers believe is because they have been used up. This means older brains have to reuse the "un-silenced" synapses, boosting their power with increased amounts of neurotransmitters, chemicals which fuel the transmission of the chemical signals.
Nov 7, 06: Using anabolic steroids is linked to antisocial behavior such as illegal weapon possession and fraud, according a Swedish study that provided a fresh warning about the dangers of the muscle-building drugs.
. . But the researchers said they were somewhat surprised to find that steroid users were no more likely than nonusers to commit violent crimes such as murder and assault. Sexual offenses such as rape and property crimes also were not linked to steroid use, they found.
. . The researchers examined the relationship between steroids --already associated with increased aggressiveness and impulsive violent outbursts sometimes dubbed "roid rage"-- and criminal behavior. They looked at people using steroids without a doctor's prescription. The people in the Swedish study, whose average age was 20, were referred to the laboratory for drug testing by police, customs agents, substance abuse clinics and psychiatric facilities. [OOPS! & found that people in the study, all of whom who already broke one law, also broke another?! Doesn't that void the study?]
. . "Our findings indicate that the use of (anabolic steroids) is associated not only with impulsive antisocial behavior but also with an antisocial lifestyle involving various types of criminality", some requiring advance planning. The steroid users were roughly twice as likely to have been found guilty of a weapons crime and 1-1/2 times as likely to have been found guilty of fraud.
. . Anabolic steroids are drugs related to male sex hormones. For men, steroids can shrink testicles, lower sperm count, raise prostate cancer risk and cause infertility and baldness. For women, they can cause facial hair growth, male-pattern baldness, menstrual problems and a deeper voice. They can stunt the growth of adolescents. Researchers also have seen among steroid abusers extreme mood swings, impulsiveness, depression, paranoid jealousy, extreme irritability, delusions and impaired judgment.
Oct 5, 06: Physical cleanliness and moral purity have a long association in religion, language and other human behaviors. Cleanliness is next to godliness; the Mandarin term for a thief is "a pair of dirty hands"; and, perhaps most famously, Lady Macbeth desperately attempts to wash away a spot of blood after murdering Duncan. Behavioral researchers Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist at Northwestern University explored this so-called "Macbeth effect" in a series of experiments with undergraduates. The research revealed that, unconsciously at least, you can wash away your sins.
. . After asking 45 more students to recall an unethical behavior from their past, the researchers offered 22 of them a sanitary wipe while leaving the rest of their peers in an "unclean" state. They then asked for unpaid volunteers to aid a desperate graduate student with another study: 74% of those in the unclean state offered their help versus only 41% of those who had cleaned themselves, according to results published in the September 8 issue of Science. "Washing hands can reduce physical disgust but it can also reduce moral emotions."
. . Perhaps if Macbeth had helped his Lady keep a clean home, they might not have engaged in such dirty deeds.
The Pirahã (pronounced pee-ra-HA), a hunter-gatherer tribe of 200 who live in groups of 10 or 20 along the Maici River in the Lowland Amazon area of Brazil. An oddity: the Pirahã have no numbers or clear words for quantities, have no differentiated words for familial relationships, and only a few to describe time. They do not read or write, do not talk about abstract subjects, do not use complex sentences and do not learn Portuguese, even though they are in constant contact with the outside world. The members had a quantification system with terms for "one", "two" and "many."
Oct 2, 06: It's typically the women of movies and television shows that swipe credit cards at shopping malls. But in reality, nearly as many men suffer from compulsive buying disorder as women, a new study finds.
Oct 2, 06: The harder you focus on something, the less well you may actually see it, US researchers have discovered --there's an attentional illusion. This paradox, might explain how it is possible to miss visual cues.
. . Volunteers asked to pay close attention to black and white stripes were less able to discern them as a result. Although focusing your sight on an object is helpful initially, investigators Samuel Ling and Marisa Carrasco found that this benefit soon fades.
. . The researchers believe this paradox may have an evolutionary advantage. For example, tuning out visual information that you have already processed frees up the brain's limited resources to detect changes in other parts of the environment --a necessary ability for animals preyed upon in the wild.
. . But this can also backfire. Predators can take advantage of this too, staying still for prolonged periods between intermittent advances on their prey until they are within striking distance.
Sept 28, 06: [...so being just average is a *good thing...] When someone is "easy on the eye", it could also be because they are easy on the brain, according to a new international study. Scientists from universities in the US and New Zealand analyzed previous studies and conducted new research to find that attractiveness could be linked to ease of mental processing.
. . The study looked at previous research that found people rated images of standard-looking objects or people as more attractive than variations of these things. They also tested people by showing them a prototype image made up of dots and geometric patterns and variations of it to see which people liked the most. Piotr Winkielman of the University of California, who led the research, said the less time it took to classify a pattern, the more attractive it was judged.
. . Winkielman pointed out that this "beauty in averageness" could apply to things like the silhouette of a car, a watch, as well as to people. "An anecdote was reported in the paper that some guy won a chili cooking contest by basically going around to various competitors and putting a spoon of chili into his own pot and eventually he found the perfect, well balanced flavor."
Sept 27, 06: It's difficult to empathize with, let alone have sympathy for, a psychopath. But one scientist believes psychopaths, despite their sometimes terrifying behavior, deserve compassion. At its core, he argues, psychopathy is a learning disability that makes it difficult for psychopaths to stop themselves from pursuing harmful behavior.
. . Many psychopaths end up in jail, where they comprise up to 25% of the incarcerated population. Outside of prison, just 1% is diagnosed with the disorder. The incidence of psychopathy is about the same as schizophrenia, but a clear differential exists when it comes to studying the former, says Joseph Newman, chairman of the psychology department at the University of Wisconsin.
. . His The Psychopath: Theory, Research and Practice, was published earlier this month. Newman's work challenges the popular belief that psychopaths have a high fear threshold and an inability to feel emotions. His theories are based on 25 years of research on 1,000 psychopaths.
. . They are a peculiarly diverse bunch --a whiny, puny 130-pound male who had probably never physically hurt anyone, females who "use their sexual skills to manipulate others", and a hulking, 6-foot-4-inch inmate with the words "love" and "hate" tattooed on each hand and a rap sheet that includes breaking his victims' fingers.
. . Newman differentiates between the psychopath, born with faulty wiring, and the sociopath, whose callous behavior results from poor parenting or the influences of deviant groups like gangs. One thing that Newman and other experts agree on is that psychopaths lack human empathy. And while he disagrees that psychopaths are emotionless, he concedes that they fall short in their personal relationships, especially when their responsibilities "conflict with immediate self-interests and other desires that become primary."
. . The key deficit in psychopaths, he says, is an inability to process contextual cues, which makes them oblivious to the implications of their actions, both for themselves and for their potential victims.
. . Is there hope for treating people born with psychopathy? One expert believes there is --especially if the disorder is diagnosed early. Paul Frick, a psychologist and professor at the University of New Orleans, says that children with conduct disorder, a precursor to antisocial personality disorder that can include psychopathy, can be taught to empathize with others if interventions occur before age 5. A "reward-oriented response" from parents and teachers seems to promote better behavior.
Sept 21, 06: Graduate business students in the United States and Canada are more likely to cheat on their work than their counterparts in other academic fields, the author of a research paper said.
Sept 20, 06: U.S. researchers said today they had identified an "on-off" switch in the brain that controls the emotional response to fear, and said it might some day be manipulated to help patients with anxiety disorders. They used a simple attention test and a type of real-time brain scan called functional magnetic resonance imaging, which can catch the brain in action.
Sept 8, 06: Men are smarter than women, according to a controversial new study that adds another cinder to the fiery debate over whether gender impacts general intelligence.
. . "For 100 years, there's been a consensus among psychologists that there is no sex difference in intelligence", said J. Philippe Rushton, a psychologist at the U of Western Ontario, Canada. Recent studies, however, have raised questions about the validity of this claim, he said. One such study showed that men have larger brains than women, a 100 gram difference after correcting for body size. Rushton found similar results in a study of gender and brain size
. . To determine if there was a link between gender and intelligence, and perhaps between brain size and intelligence, Rushton and a colleague analyzed the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores from 100,000 17- and 18-year-olds.
. . When Rushton and colleagues weighted each SAT question by an established general intelligence factor called the g-factor, they discovered that males surpassed females by an average of 3.6 IQ points
. . While Rushton called his results significant, he doesn't think they are a basis for uprooting the field of education. "I don't think it has any real implications for education policy or schoolwork", he said. "In fact, females actually get better grades than males.” Plus, he doesn't think the IQ difference would show up in everyday activities. "For the vast majority of people in the vast majority of jobs, it really doesn't translate into very much", he said.
. . But when it comes to Nobel Prize winners, he said that men could outnumber women 10-to-1. "Where it will really show up is at the very high end of the distribution", Rushton said. Rushton has left the door open for opposing views and findings that might contradict his new study.
Sept 8, 06: Men may have developed a psychology that makes them particularly able to engage in wars, a scientist said today.
. . New research has shown that men bond together and cooperate well in the face of adversity to protect their interests more than women, which could explain why war is almost exclusively a male business, according to Professor Mark van Vugt of the U of Kent in southern England. "Men respond more strongly to outward threats, we've labeled that the 'man warrior effect'", he said.
Sept 7, 06: [Is there psychology in other animals, too? Sure.] Blackbirds born in urban environments have developed ways to keep their stress levels down compared to their forest-dwelling counterparts, a new study suggests.
. . The research shows for the first time that city life impacts how wild animals respond to stressors. For instance, whereas creating a nest on the side of an apartment building may not rouse a second-generation city blackbird, the same scenario could skyrocket anxiety chemicals in rural birds
. . The researchers measured levels of glucocorticoids, stress hormones that help the birds survive under difficult environmental conditions. Compared with the forest-born nestlings, the urban birds showed reduced levels of stress hormones after the researchers had stressed the birds by capturing them in cotton bags and handling them.
Sept 7, 06: It's not just hormones that kick in during adolescence, the brain also undergoes massive development which might help to explain teenage behavior, a British scientist said today.
. . Until recently, it was assumed that the brain stopped developing before puberty, but new research shows there are changes in areas of the brain linked to decision-making, planning and social awareness in adolescence. "What this brain-imaging data ... suggest is that it is just not hormones that are causing teenagers to be their typical selves it could also be the fact that their brains are developing as well."
. . Blakemore and her team did functional MRI scans of the brains of adolescents and young adults who were told to think about their own intentions, such as wanting to go to the cinema and what they needed to do. "We know that kind of task involves the prefrontal cortex", Blakemore said, referring to a region of the brain involved in understanding other people and social cognition.
. . She found that a network of brain areas are used. The prefrontal cortex activity involved in the task increased with age while use in a region in the back of the brain declined. Adults used the prefrontal cortex more than adolescents. "It is as if the pattern of brain activity shifts from the back of the brain to the front of the brain during adolescence to do these kinds of empathy tasks. We found that that decision-making process became quicker with age. It suggests that the ability to take someone else's perspective is refined with age. It becomes more efficient."
Sept 7, 06: Rituals that cleanse the body to purify the soul are at the core of religions worldwide. Now scientists find these ceremonies apparently have a psychological basis.
. . Researchers discovered sins actually seem to urge people to clean themselves, a phenomenon they dubbed the "Macbeth effect" after dramatized murderess Lady Macbeth, who vainly tried scrubbing her hands clean of imaginary blood in Shakespeare's famed Scottish play. Intriguingly, the researchers also found purifying the body then helped people absolve their consciences.
. . Future studies could see whether "living in a very clean environment facilitates more ethical behavior, or ironically licenses unethical behavior", Liljenquist added.
. . In their last set of experiments, the researchers asked volunteers to first remember an unethical deed and then either gave them the chance to wash their hands or not. When the students were afterward asked whether they would volunteer without pay for another research study to help out a desperate graduate student, 74 percent of those who had not washed their hands offered to help, while only 41 percent of the participants who had a chance to wash their hands did. This suggested volunteers who did not get the chance to clean themselves felt a need "to absolve their consciences," Liljenquist said.
. . Whether the psychological impact of cleansing rituals existed before religion adopted them or whether such an impact arose after religions ingrained cleansing rituals into society remains an as yet unresolved chicken-or-egg question. To answer it, Liljenquist said future experiments can explore whether a person's level of religiosity moderates the Macbeth effect and what specific negative emotions trigger it the most deeply in people.
Aug 15, 06: Children with older brothers and sisters find it easier to make people laugh, a survey has suggested. Just over half of younger siblings questioned said it was easy to be humorous, compared with just a third of those who were first-born. And just 11% of only children had the skill, according to the study of 1,000 people.
. . Experts said younger children were more likely to feel the need to compete for parental attention. And being funny continues into adulthood. "They are risk-takers, and also more humorous. "On the other hand, older children tend to take on much more serious roles. And only children don't feel the need to compete for attention."
. . The California team found that, while the majority of US presidents were first-borns - including Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and George W Bush, revolutionaries, including Marx and Castro were younger siblings.
. . The report also found gender differences in attitudes to humor. 70% of women find it difficult to remember the punch line to jokes, compared with just 50% of men. And 25% of men said they laughed most with their best friends compared with just 16% of women. Men reported being successful when trying to make women laugh 71% of the time, compared with a lowly 39% success rate for women trying to make men laugh.
. . Professor Wiseman added: "The study reveals that laughter is hugely important to Britons, with 82% stating they find it easy to make others laugh.
Aug 12, 06: Lonely? Feeling low? Try taking a walk --down the aisle. Getting married enhances mental health, especially if you're depressed, according to a new U.S. study.
. . The benefits of marriage for the depressed are particularly dramatic. "We actually found the opposite of what we expected." They expected to find that one spouse's depression weighed too much on the marriage, but "just mattering to someone else can help alleviate symptoms of depression."
. . "Depressed people may be just especially in need of the intimacy, the emotional closeness and the social support that marriage can provide. People who were happy before getting married and end up in a marriage plagued by distance or conflict --qualities associated with a depressed spouse-- might be better off single.
Left-handed men, often seen as having an advantage over right-handed counterparts in sports like tennis, also enjoy much better paydays, a new study says. "We do not have a theory that reconciles all of these findings."
. . Left-handed men with at least some college education earned 15% more than similarly educated right-handers, while those who finished college earned about 26% more. The researchers did not find a similar effect among women.
Aug 1, 06: Breast-feeding's calming effects seem to be long-lasting. Years after being weaned, breast-fed children cope better with stressful situations like their parents' divorce than their bottle-fed peers, researchers said.
. . Breast milk is full of nutrients, hormones, enzymes, growth factors and antibodies that are passed from mother to child. Research has shown breast-feeding reduces infections, respiratory illness and diarrhoea in the child and cuts the risk of after-birth bleeding in the mother.
Aug 2, 06: The older we get, the more we regret choosing virtue over vice, new research shows.
. . Everyone is familiar with the flip-flop between guilt and regret when it comes to decisions between indulgence or keeping your nose to the grindstone. Ran Kivetz and Anat Keinan of Columbia University have now shown that the guilt that we often feel right after making "indulgent" choices flares up as quickly as it passes. However, regrets over missed opportunities for fun never fade. In fact, they increase over time. The upshot is that vices are regretted in the short-run, and virtues are regretted in the long-run.
. . They asked subjects to recall a situation in which they chose either work or pleasure and then to rate the extent to which they regretted their past choice. Those who chose pleasure over work experienced less regret when they considered a distant rather than a near past decision.
. . Another experiment involved asking 69 college students the week after winter break to report how much regret they felt for their inactions—both missed opportunities for fun and missed opportunities for making money or working more—during the break either a week ago or a year ago. Subjects reported more regret for failing to indulge in fun during the distant winter break than for failing to indulge during the near past winter break.
. . Former Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas once said: "Nobody on his deathbed ever said, 'I wish I had spent more time at the office.'"
July 28, 06: If you're looking for happiness, go and live in Denmark. It is the happiest country in the world while Burundi in Africa is the most unhappy, according to a report by a British scientist. White said his research had produced the "first world map of happiness". The main factors that affected happiness were health provision, wealth and education.
. . Following behind Denmark came Switzerland, Austria, Iceland and the Bahamas.
. . At the bottom came the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe and Burundi. The United States came in at 23rd, Britain was in 41st place, Germany 35th, and France 62nd. Countries involved in conflicts, such as Iraq, were not included.
. . "We were surprised to see countries in Asia scoring so low, with China 82nd, Japan 90th, and India 125th. These are countries that are thought as having a strong sense of collective identity which other researchers have associated with well-being."
July 14, 06: Without realizing it, people will perceive things according to how they want to see them, a new study suggests. [FINALLY! Proof of my aphorism: "Conception colors perception".]
. . "There is an age old hypothesis in psychology that a person's wishes, hopes and desires can influence what they see", said David Dunning, Cornell University psychologist and co-author of the study. This theory had lay dormant for about 40 years, though, without any supporting evidence.
. . Volunteers from Cornell were presented with an ambiguous picture that could be interpreted as two distinct figures --either a horse's head or the body of a seal, for example. They were told they would be assigned to a taste test of either fresh-squeezed orange juice or a gelatinous, clumpy and rather unappealing veggie smoothie, depending on whether they saw a farm animal or sea creature.
. . More often than not, the participants chose the figure that would lead them to the juice. The trick to making the study meaningful was making sure the test subjects didn't know what was going on, Dunning said, noting that the generally high IQ of Cornell students made cheating a real possibility. "We also tracked automatic, unconscious eye movements which were out of their control."
. . Not only did participants routinely see the figure that produced favorable results, their eye motions indicated that they were never aware of the alternate option being available.
. . Other scientists who have studied the connection between belief and physiological reactions in the eye, now supported by Dunning's research, point to its possibilities in the world of positive thinking and self-motivation.
. . "Determining whether a person walking towards you is smiling or smirking, how close the finish line seems in a race or how loud a partner—a wife, husband, lover—is yelling during an argument", Dunning gave as examples that could arise in life. "Could we interpret ambiguous situations towards our expectations and hopes and away from our fears? That is the ultimate question."
July 13,06: A singing professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London and curator of an exhibition on the composer Handel's use of the castrati, Clapton said the removal of boy chorists' testicles kept their vocal chords small while the hormonal changes meant their bodies kept growing well into adulthood.
. . The Catholic Church banned it on pain of excommunication, while also using castrati in choirs and the Vatican's Sistine Chapel until as recently as 1903, Clapton said.
. . The last surviving castrato, Sistine Chapel chorist Alessandro Moreschi, lived long enough to make recordings in 1902 and 1904, though on the dated gramophone records his voice sound like what Clapton described as "Pavarotti on helium."
July 13,06: [This is what I'd call Fetal Tobacco Syndrome!! JKH] A new study finds that unborn babies regularly exposed to cigarette smoke in the womb are much more likely to have behavioral problems as young children. The study is the first to show a link between smoking during pregnancy and child behavior problems in the first years of life.
. . The researchers found that 2-year-olds whose mothers were exposed to cigarette smoke while pregnant were nearly 12 times more likely to show clinical levels of behavioral problems compared to their unexposed peers.
. . The behavior of toddlers exposed to cigarette smoke got progressively worse between 18 and 24 months of age compared to unexposed toddlers.
. . In psychology, symptoms of disruptive behavior include aggression, irritability, rule breaking and poor social skills. The exposed toddlers were significantly more likely to exhibit aggressive behavior and stubbornly refuse following directions. They were also less likely to seek out and socially interact with their mothers.
July 10, 06: According to Californian researchers, receiving a reward or avoiding a punishment have the same effects… on our brains. As they report, avoiding punishment is its own reward. In other words, the same areas of our brains are stimulated when we win a game or when we avoid to lose one. For our brain, both things are similar: it has to achieve a goal.
July 9, 06: Some 2,000 pupils at English state schools are to have special classes in happiness under a pilot scheme aimed at cutting depression, self-harm and anti-social behavior.
July 5, 06: Monkeys recognize each other by comparing faces to an average stored in their brains, not by memorizing what every individual looks like, scientists said. That probably goes for people, too, explaining how faces can be recognized in a fraction of a second, they said.
. . In psychological tests, humans identify faces in much the same way as monkeys, so the researchers believe this aspect of the visual recognition system is similar in both species.
July 3, 06: People in Britain view the United States as a vulgar, crime-ridden society obsessed with money and led by an incompetent president whose Iraq policy is failing, according to a newspaper poll.
. . The United States is no longer a symbol of hope to Britain and the British no longer have confidence in their transatlantic cousins to lead global affairs, according to the poll published in The Daily Telegraph.
. . The YouGov poll found that 77% of respondents disagreed with the statement that the US is "a beacon of hope for the world". A massive 83% of those questioned said that the United States doesn't care what the rest of the world thinks.
. . US President George W. Bush fared significantly worse, with just 1% rating him a "great leader" against 77% who deemed him a "pretty poor" or "terrible" leader.
. . More than two-thirds who offered an opinion said America is essentially an imperial power seeking world domination. And 81% of those who took a view said President George W Bush hypocritically championed democracy as a cover for the pursuit of American self-interests.
. . US policy in Iraq was similarly derided, with only 24% saying they felt that the US military action there was helping to bring democracy to the country.
. . In answer to other questions, a majority of the Britons questions described Americans as uncaring, divided by class, awash in violent crime, vulgar, preoccupied with money, ignorant of the outside world, racially divided, uncultured and in the most overwhelming result (90% of respondents) dominated by big business.
June 29, 06: Your next raise might buy you a more lavish vacation, a better car, or a few extra bedrooms, but it's not likely to buy you much happiness. Measuring the quality of people's daily lives via surveys, the results of a study published in the June 30 issue of journal Science reveals that income plays a rather insignificant role in day-to-day happiness.
. . Although most people imagine that if they had more money they could do more fun things and perhaps be happier, the reality seems to be that those with higher incomes tend to be tenser, and spend less time on simple leisurely activities.
June 27, 06: Forget about installing closed-circuit surveillance cameras --a simple, low-cost defence against thieves and freeloaders may be a photocopy of a pair of eyes. Researchers into behavior at the University of Newcastle, conducted a sly experiment on their colleagues.
. . The leisure area in the university's psychology department had an "honesty box" in which academics were asked to pay for using tea, coffee and milk. Over 10 weeks, the researchers placed a sign on the door of the cupboard where the honesty box was located and situated above the kettle and coffeemaker. Pictures of flowers alternated weekly with pictures of eyes --male or female, with expressions that ranged from alert and watchful to manic. Every week, the money collected in the honesty box was totted up. On weeks when the "eyes" image was shown, takings were 276% more than during the "flower" weeks.
. . Why were the eyes so effective? Shame, is one answer. Humans are "strongly attuned" to subconscious cues about behaviour that could damage their reputation, the study suggests.
June 23, 06: People in America have fewer close friends nowadays than two decades ago, researchers announced today. New research compared studies from 1985 and 2004. On average, each person in 2004 reported 2.08 close friends -—those they can discuss important matters with. That's down from 2.94 people in 1985.
. . People who said they had no one with whom to discuss such matters more than doubled, to nearly 25%. The research also showed that people who talk only to family members about important matters increased from 57% to 80% over the two decades, while the number who depend totally on a spouse rose from 5% to 9%.
. . The results are based on responses from more than 1,400 American adults to the General Social Survey, conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago since 1972.
June 14, 06: If you've ever had a headache while trying to choose between a sure thing and a more risky option with higher rewards, it might be because conflicting parts of your brain are waging war against each other.
. . A new study found regions in the brain that are active when a person decides whether to exploit a known commodity or explore a potentially better option. The finding suggests that in order to explore new and potentially rewarding options, the brain must override the desire for immediate profit.
. . As the participants were deciding to explore for higher rewards, regions of the brain located behind the forehead and associated with logic became active. If they chose to exploit, regions deeper in the brain associated with pleasure and reward were more active. "You have logic pitted against these areas that are more associated with pleasure than value."
. . These types of decisions play an important role in an organism's survival ability. For example, should a deer stick to reliable but meager pastures or expose itself to predators in a search for potentially greener grass.
June 5, 06: Parents who are strict disciplinarians are far more likely to wind up with children who are fat by age 6, perhaps because the youngsters over-eat as a reaction to stress, a study said today.
. . Parents who are strict disciplinarians are far more likely to wind up with children who are fat by age 6, perhaps because the youngsters over-eat as a reaction to stress. The report from Boston University School of Medicine also found that the fewest weight problems occur among children whose parents are "authoritative" --having high expectations for self control but respectful of a child's opinions and who set clear boundaries.
. . The study also found that children of parents who are permissive, defined as indulgent and without discipline, also have weight problems but not to the degree of the offspring of strict disciplinarians with low levels of sensitivity.
June 5, 06: Here's a shocker: "Men who are not confident in their sporting abilities may try and make up for this by drinking excessively." So says Richard de Visser, whose new study looked into the masculine behaviors of young men in London and how it all affects their health.
May 25, 06: It's not your skill at crunching numbers that determines whether you'll grow up to be a scientist, but how badly you want to be one as a child, new research shows. The study analyzed surveys from a group of 8th-graders in 1988 that later received their college degrees, finding that early interest goes a long way in career choice.
May 16, 06: A new review of scientific studies supports the idea that children do not take all the teachings of parents and teachers at face value. Most parents would hope and expect as much --nobody wants an automaton. But the study revealed an interesting sidebar that is tougher to explain. Among things they can't see, from germs to God, children seem to be more confident in the information they get about invisible scientific objects than about things in the spiritual realm.
May 16, 06: We all lie, all the time. It causes problems, to say the least. So why do we do it? It boils down to the shifting sands of the self and trying to look good both to ourselves and others, experts say.
. . "It's tied in with self-esteem", says University of Massachusetts psychologist Robert Feldman. "We find that as soon as people feel that their self-esteem is threatened, they immediately begin to lie at higher levels."
. . Not all lies are harmful. In fact, sometimes lying is the best approach for protecting privacy and ourselves and others from malice, some researchers say. Some deception, such as boasting and lies in the name of tact and politeness, can be classified as less than serious. But bald-faced lies (whether they involve leaving out the truth or putting in something false), are harmful, as they corrode trust and intimacy—the glue of society.
. . The study, published in the Journal of Basic and Applied Psychology, found that 60% of people had lied at least once during the 10-minute conversation, saying an average of 2.92 inaccurate things. "We're trying not so much to impress other people but to maintain a view of ourselves that is consistent with the way they would like us to be", Feldman said. We want to be agreeable, to make the social situation smoother or easier, and to avoid insulting others through disagreement or discord.
. . Men lie no more than women, but they tend to lie to make themselves look better, while women are more likely to lie to make the other person feel better.
Extroverts tend to lie more than introverts.
May 2, 06: People born in spring or early summer in the northern hemisphere have a 17% increased risk of committing suicide than those with birthdays in the autumn or early winter, researchers said. They found that women born in April, May and June were 29.6% more likely to take their own lives while men had a 13.7 increased risk.
. . They said seasonal birth trends for illnesses including breast and testicular cancer, coronary heart disease, brain tumors, Crohn's disease and early onset non-Hodgkin's lymphoma had been established.
. . Their findings are in line with reported higher birth rates in the spring and early summer of people suffering from alcoholism and mood disorders whose suicide deaths are about 10% of the annual total in England and Wales.
. . But Salib said the findings are not consistent with research showing schizophrenia, which is also linked to suicide risk, is associated with winter births.
May 2, 06: In a survey of 2,927 new moms, 19% reported moderate to severe symptoms of postpartum depression, and 8% reported that their babies were difficult to console. The key finding: Mothers reporting depression were more than twice as likely to report infant inconsolability.
. . The study is the first to establish a link between colic and depression using a large sample of women. "We can't say that inconsolability causes depression or that depression causes inconsolability", said study leader Pamela High, a professor of pediatrics at Brown Medical School.
May 1, 06: Now scientists say they can actually measure happiness. Neuroscientists are measuring pleasure. They suggest that happiness is more than a vague concept or mood; it is real. Social scientists measure happiness simply by asking people how happy they are.
. . It is argued that what a person says about their own happiness tends to tally with what friends or even strangers might say about them if asked the same question. Most people say they are fairly happy.
. . And if true, governments could be judged by how happy they make us. An adviser to the Prime Minister, David Halpern, told us that within the next 10 years the government would be measured against how happy it made everybody.
. . In survey after survey involving huge groups of people, significant correlations between happiness and some other factors are repeated. At the moment, scientists cannot prove causation, whether for example people are healthy because they are happy, or whether people are happy because they are healthy. However, psychologists have been able to identify some very strong links.
. . According to Professor Diener, the evidence suggests that happy people live longer than depressed people. "In one study, the difference was nine years between the happiest group and the unhappiest group, so that's a huge effect.
. . Scientists think they know the reason why we do not feel happier despite all the extra money and material things we can buy. First, it is thought we adapt to pleasure. We go for things which give us short bursts of pleasure whether it is a chocolate bar or buying a new car. But it quickly wears off.
. . Second, its thought that we tend to see our life as judged against other people. We compare our lot against others. Richer people do get happier when they compare themselves against poorer people, but poorer people are less happy if they compare up. The good news is that we can choose how much and who we compare ourselves with and about what, and researchers suggest we adapt less quickly to more meaningful things such as friendship and life goals.
. . First, family and friends are crucial --the wider and deeper the relationships with those around you the better.
. . One economist, Professor Oswald at Warwick University, has a formula to work out how much extra cash we would need to make up for not having friends. The answer is £50,000.
. . Marriage also seems to be very important. According to research the effect of marriage adds an average seven years to the life of a man and something like four for a woman.
. . Also, having goals embedded in your long term values that you're working for, but also that you find enjoyable.
. . According to the positive psychologist Professor Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania it is possible to lift our biological set range of happiness, at least to some extent if we work at it. "The best you can do with positive emotion is you can get people to live at the top of their set range. So I think you've got about 10 to 15% leverage, but you can't take a grouch and make him giggle all the time."
Apr 30, 06: Psychiatric scientists at The Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Glen Oaks, N.Y., say they've found a gene that seems to influence intelligence. They examined the genetic blueprints of individuals with schizophrenia, a neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by cognitive impairment, and compared them with healthy volunteers. They discovered the dysbindin-1 gene, which they previously demonstrated to be associated with schizophrenia, may also be linked to general cognitive ability.
A Pew Research Center survey found that though 67% of us believe that the United States is a Christian nation, 75% say many religions —not just Christianity— can lead to eternal life.
Apr 25, 06: The shapes of letters in all languages are derived from common forms in nature, according to a new hypothesis. The idea, in some ways seemingly obvious and innately human, arose however from a study of how robots see the world. Robots employ object recognition technology to navigate a room by recognizing contours. A corner is seen as a "Y," for example, and a wall is recognized by the L-shape it makes where it meets the floor.
. . "It struck me that these junctions are typically named with letters, such as 'L,' 'T,' 'Y,' 'K,' and 'X,' and that it may not be a coincidence that the shapes of these letters look like the things they really are in nature." Changizi and his colleagues think letters and symbols in Chinese, Latin, Persian, and all 97 of the other writing systems that have been used through the ages have shapes that humans are good at seeing.
. . "Evolution has shaped our visual system to be good at seeing the structures we commonly encounter in nature, and culture has apparently selected our writing systems and visual signs to have these same shapes."
Apr 25, 06: A new study of 8,000 people age 2 to 90 found females handle timed tasks more quickly than males. The difference is most pronounced among pre-teens and teenagers. The study did not reveal significant overall intelligence difference by gender, however. And... the newly revealed gender gap in processing speed is not related to things like reaction time while playing a video game.
. . "Consider that many classroom activities, including testing, are directly or indirectly related to processing speed. The higher performance in females may contribute to a classroom culture that favors females, not because of teacher bias but because of inherent differences in sex processing speed."
. . Children in kindergarten and younger process tasks at similar speeds. The difference becomes pronounced in elementary school. On the portions of standardized tests that reflected processing speed, and among those age 14-18 in the study sample, girls scored an average of 105.5 whereas boys scored 97.4.
. . The study also found that boys consistently outperformed girls in identifying objects, knowing antonyms and synonyms, and completing verbal analogies. The researchers say that debunks the popular notion that girls develop all communication skills earlier than boys.
Apr 22, 06: Researchers at Harvard Medical School in Boston have identified neurons, or brain cells, that seem to play a role in how a person selects different items or goods. If choosing the right outfit or whether to invest in stocks or bonds is difficult, it may not be just indecisiveness but how brain cells assign values to different items, scientists said.
. . Scientists have known that cells in different parts of the brain react to attributes such as color, taste or quantity. They found neurons involved in assigning values that help people to make choices. They located the neurons in an area of the brain known as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) while studying macaque monkeys which had to choose between different flavors and quantities of juices.
. . Earlier research involving the OFC showed that lesions in the area seem to have an association with eating disorders, compulsive gambling and unusual social behavior. The new findings show an association between the activity of the OFC and the mental valuation process underlying choice behavior.
Apr 22, 06: How fast does your brain process information? At www.positscience.com you can take an online test and determine the precise answer. The process takes 10 minutes, and results are compared to averages for your age range, using charts.
Apr 19, 06: More Americans are interested in science news and information than is commonly thought, a new study suggests. But not everyone wears the intrigue on their sleeves. In fact, some people are downright silent about their scientific interests, perhaps not wanting to be perceived as nerds.
. . The research aimed to get beyond the recognized geek population and gauge interest in science among the roughly 150 million Americans age 18-54. About 40% of them, or 60 million people, were found to be "intellectually curious" about politics, the arts and science, all spending significant time with newspapers, related television channels and online media.
. . Among the intellectually curious group, those who are aware of science-oriented websites tend to visit them frequently. Some 85% said they are intrigued by scientific breakthroughs and innovation, compared to 35% of those outside the group. And while 72% of the intellectually curious say science is relevant to many aspects of their lives, that figure is 26% among the rest of the population.
. . Further study of the intellectually curious segment revealed three distinct groups. If you are reading this, you likely fit into one of them:
. . *1: Science with Passion (14% of the 18-54 group): This group contains the geeks and nerds. They don't need to be prompted to share their love of science. "They might switch a cocktail party from politics to science", said OMD researcher Mike Hess in a telephone interview. They watch the Discovery Channel, the Science Channel and PBS. Prime interests: nature, medicine and the environment. This group is 53% female.
. . *2: Money, Success and Science (11% of the 18-54 group): These people are also very interested in science. But they're unlikely to discuss it. The study did not reveal why, but they were also very interested in privacy and their higher interest in careers and success suggests they do not want to be perceived as nerdy, Hess speculated. They are notably interested in the Sci-Fi channel as well as science programming. Prime interest: technology. This group is 64% male.
. . *3: Style with Science (15% of the 18-54 group): This high-income group follows science but would rather be throwing a party or out on the town than watching TV or having a quiet evening. They do like "Desperate Housewives", however. "If an opportunity arises at a cocktail party [to discuss science] they'll engage", Hess said. Prime interests: technology, weather and nature. This group is 57% male.
Apr 11, 06: A new study finds that people who have had near-death experiences are generally more likely to have difficulty separating sleep from wakefulness. The experience was defined as a life-threatening episode such as a car accident or heart attack when the person experienced a variety of feelings, including:
. . * a sense of unusual peace
. . * alertness
. . * being outside their bodies
. . * seeing intense light
For 60% of those who had been through an NDE, the rapid-eye movement (REM) state of sleep intrudes into their regular consciousness while awake, the study found. Both before and after their traumatic event, these people had experiences that include waking up and not being able to move, sudden muscle weakness in their legs, and hearing sounds that no one else hears upon waking or falling asleep. Only 24% of people who had not had an NDE report this REM intrusion.
. . The human arousal system is activated from the brain stem, a primordial control system that manages other vital functions like heartbeat and breathing. We all have a switch there that regulates between REM sleep and being awake. "These findings suggest that REM-state intrusion contributes to near-death experiences", Nelson said. "People who have near-death experiences may have an arousal system that predisposes them to REM intrusion."
. . Nelson says that about 10% of cardiac arrest patients who survive had an NDE during the event. In a Dutch study of 344 cardiac patients who had been resuscitated after clinical death, 62 of them, or 18%, reported an NDE.
. . What's going on: During REM sleep, many body functions are known to change. Muscles lose their tone, for example.
. . In a crisis, if the REM-state intrudes on an otherwise awake person, the lack of muscle tone "could reinforce a person's sense of being dead and convey the impression of death to other people", Nelson said. "REM-state intrusion during danger and brain impairment from lack of blood flow or oxygen could contribute to the experience of near death."
. . NDEs appear not to be dreams, however. "Most dreaming occurs in REM sleep and despite the possible contribution to NDE by REM-intrusion, NDE and dreams fundamentally differ", Nelson explains. "Near-death experiences are recalled with an intense sense of realness that contrasts sharply to dreams. Furthermore, NDEs lack the bizarre characteristics of dreams."
Apr 4, 06: It's a well-known fact that when we learn something new, our brains replay this information when we sleep to be sure to remember it later. But according to PLoS Biology, using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Belgian researchers have now demonstrated that asleep or awake we retain memory. Even during the day, when we are engaged into other activities, our brain reprocesses the information acquired a few minutes ago.
Apr 7, 06: Nobody likes a freeloader. Social parasites live off the work of others, and a society infested with too many of them falls apart. Given the chance, most people will punish moochers with "freeloader fines", even if it means taking a financial hit themselves, a new study finds.
Apr 7, 06: People tend to see the glass half full more frequently as they age, new research indicates. Researchers showed test subjects virtual faces portraying sadness, anger, fear and happiness. They used eye-tracking technology to record which faces the subjects looked at and for how long. Test subjects age 18-21 focused on the fear faces. Those 57 to 84 zeroed in on the happy faces and avoided the angry ones.
. . What's it mean? Perhaps with their time on Earth getting shorter, people tend to focus on things that make them feel good now, the researchers figure. Whatever the reason, they seem motivated to avoid focusing on negative information.
Apr 1, 06: If you're down in the dumps, you might just think about watching a funny movie. A new study suggests that the mere expectation of laughter makes us feel good.
. . Researchers split people into two groups. One group was told they'd be watching a funny movie, the other was not. "Blood drawn from experimental subjects just before they watched the video had 27% more beta-endorphins and 87% more human growth hormone, compared to blood from the control group, which didn't anticipate the watching of a humorous video."
. . Berk said that combined with prior research into how laughter improves mood, the results "would appear to carry important, positive implications for wellness, disease-prevention and most certainly stress-reduction."
. . Levels of these known feel-good substances remained elevated during the video, which brought about what the researchers call "mirthful laughter", and for 12 to 24 hours afterward.
Apr 1, 06: A study of more than 1,800 patients who underwent heart bypass surgery has failed to show that prayers specially organized for their recovery had any impact, researchers said. In fact, the study found some of the patients who knew they were being prayed for did worse than others who were only told they might be prayed for --though those who did the study said they could not explain why.
. . The patients in the study at six U.S. hospitals included 604 who were actually prayed for after being told they might or might not be; another 597 patients who were not prayed for after being told they might or might not be; and a group of 601 who were prayed for and told they would be the subject of such prayer. The prayers started on the eve of or day of surgery and lasted for two weeks.
. . Among the first group --who were prayed for but only told they might be-- 52% had post-surgical complications compared to 51% in the second group, the ones who were not prayed for though told they might be. In the third group, who knew they were being prayed for, 59% had complications.
. . After 30 days, however, the death rates and incidence of major complications was about the same across all three groups, said the study published in the American Heart Journal. The study --called the largest of its kind-- was designed only to try to measure the impact of intercessory prayer on heart surgery patients, an intervention that some earlier reports had showed seemed to be beneficial.
Mar 29, 06: Intelligence may have more to do with how the brain develops during adolescence than its overall size, researchers said. Using magnetic resonance imaging, scientists at the National Institutes of Health have shown that the brains of children with high IQs show a distinct pattern of development.
. . The cortex, or outer mantle of the brain, starts out thinner and thickens more rapidly in very intelligent children. It peaks around 11 or 12 years old before thinning rapidly in the late teens. Youngsters with average IQs had a thicker cortex to start with and peaked earlier before gradual thinning began.
. . Shaw added that the changes were subtle and what is driving them is a mystery. Why children have a thicker or thinner cortex initially is also not known. "Brainy children are not cleverer solely by virtue of having more or less grey matter at any one age", said Judith Rapoport, a co-author of the study. "Rather, IQ is related to the dynamics of cortex maturation."
. . The smartest youngsters showed the highest rate of change in the scans. The scientists believe the longer thickening time in the very brainy children might indicate a longer period for the development of high-level cognitive circuits in the brain. The researchers added that the thinning phase could involve a "use it or lose it" pruning, or killing off, of brain cells and their connections as the brain matures and becomes more efficient. "That might be happening more efficiently in the most intelligent children", said Shaw. "People with very agile minds tend to have a very agile cortex."
Mar 24, 06: A lot of people dislike math, but neuroscientist Brian Butterworth remembers one young man who went to an unusual extreme to avoid it. "He was in jail for serial shoplifting, and the reason that he shoplifted, as far as I could tell, was because he was embarrassed to go to the [cashier]", Butterworth explains. "He was afraid that he wouldn't know how much money to give or whether he was getting the right change."
. . Butterworth is from the University of College London and an expert on dyscalculia, a psychological disorder that makes it nearly impossible to deal with numbers.
. . Dyscalculia is a learning disorder that afflicts about 6% of the population. Those afflicted with it have difficulty visualizing number sequences and even the passage of time. Distinguishing between the bigger of two numbers can be difficult. Butterworth says there might be up to three different types, but that a person either has it or they don't.
. . "Of course, dyscalculics can learn to count, but where most people can immediately tell that nine is bigger than seven, anyone with dyscalculia may have to count the objects to be sure."
Mar 22, 06: Like teenagers, babies don't much care what their parents say.Though they are learning words at 10 months old, infants tend to grasp the names of objects that interest them rather than whatever the speaker thinks is important, a new study finds.
. . And they do it quickly. The infants were able to learn two new words in five minutes with just five presentations for each word and object, said study leader Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University. Importantly, the babies paired a new word to the object they liked best, regardless of what object the speaker referred to.
. . Later, around 18 months, children learn to use the speaker's interest -—such as where the eyes gaze—- as a guide to learning.
Mar 20, 06: The image of a twitchy nervous liar touching his nose and stroking his hair may itself be a lie, a study says. Italian and British researchers found when people lied they tended to stay still as they were acutely aware their body language might give them away.
. . The study found liars touched their noses 20% less than truth tellers. Instead of giving into these urges, liars tried very hard to stay still and were just as likely as an honest person to look the questioner in the eye. "People expect liars to be nervous and shifty and to fidget more, but our research shows that is not the case. People who are lying have to think harder, and when we think harder we tend to be a lot stiller, with fewer movements, because we are concentrating harder."
. . Those under strong suspicion used certain types of hand gestures more in order reinforce the point. The use of metaphoric gestures --such as touching the heart to show love and or the holding of hands apart to indicate size-- were used 25% more often when people lied. Rhythmic gestures such as repeated pointing to emphasise statements were also used more often by liars. However, the use of what body language experts refer to as "self-adapting gestures" such as striking the hair, nose or other parts of the body, were used those telling lies 15-20% less.
Mar 17, 06: Overall happiness among U.S. residents has not changed much over the years, according to the latest survey by the Pew Research Center that finds 34% of adults are very happy. Among 3,014 telephone respondents, half reported being pretty happy, and 15% said they are not too happy.
. . The survey, released this week, points out several disparities based on lifestyle, beliefs and political persuasion:
. . * Republicans are happier than Democrats. [more advantaged?]
. . * The rich are happier than the poor. [more advantaged?]
. . * Whites and Hispanics are happier than blacks. [more advantaged?]
. . * People who worship frequently are happier than those who don't.
. . * Married people are happier than the unmarried.
. . * Sunbelt residents are happier than everyone else.
. . * Dog owners and cat owners rate the same.
About 45% of Republicans said they were very happy, compared with 30% of Democrats. Republicans have been happier in surveys going back to 1972, the Pew study notes. The reason might seem obvious, since "Republicans tend to have more money than Democrats, and --as we've already discovered-- people who have more money tend to be happier", the report states.
Mar 16, 06: If you put a hamster on steroids, he'll attack other hamsters more quickly and more often, and bite a lot. Cut him off and you might think he'd mellow out. Not so. Hamsters on steroids remain aggressive into adulthood, according to a new study that offers yet another caution to teens who might try to bulk up artificially.
. . The hamsters started out tame. Then they were put on anabolic steroids and, as studies have shown with teens, the rodents exhibited "very high levels" of aggression, said study leader Richard Melloni, Jr. of Northeastern University. Long after the more than 100 hamsters were taken off the steroids, the aggressive tendencies, or "'roid rage" as scientists put it, remained in 85% of them.
. . Autopsies revealed their brains had changed. The anterior hypothalamus, known to regulate aggression, pumped out more of a neurotransmitter called vasopressin.
. . "Steroids step on the gas for aggression by enhancing the activity of brain areas that induce aggression", Melloni said, adding that this brain area is similar in rodents and humans. "Some of the effects may wear off after withdrawal, but aggressive behavior won't stop immediately, leaving them to be a danger to themselves and others."
Mar 3, 06: Most Americans have an easier time naming members of the cartoon Simpson family than listing the five freedoms granted by the nation's founders, a survey by a museum said.
Feb 28, 06: "It requires some effort to achieve a happy outlook on life, and most people don't make it." —Author and researcher Gregg Easterbrook. Psychologists have recently handed the keys to happiness to the public, but many people cling to gloomy ways out of habit, experts say. Polls show Americans are no happier today than they were 50 years ago.
. . Happiness is 50% genetic, says University of Minnesota researcher David Lykken. What you do with the other half of the challenge depends largely on determination, psychologists agree. As Abraham Lincoln once said, "Most people are as happy as they make up their minds to be."
. . Happiness does not come via prescription drugs, although 10% of women 18 and older, and 4% of men take antidepressants. Money that lifts people out of poverty increases happiness, but after that, the better paychecks stop paying off sense-of-well-being dividends, research shows.
. . One route to more happiness is called "flow", an engrossing state that comes during creative or playful activity, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has found. Athletes, musicians, writers, gamers, and religious adherents know the feeling. It comes less from what you're doing than from how you do it.
. . Sonja Lyubomirsky of the University of California at Riverside has discovered that the road toward a more satisfying and meaningful life involves a recipe repeated in schools, churches and synagogues. Make lists of things for which you're grateful in your life, practice random acts of kindness, forgive your enemies, notice life's small pleasures, take care of your health, practice positive thinking, and invest time and energy into friendships and family.
. . The happiest people have strong friendships, says Ed Diener, a psychologist University of Illinois. Interestingly, his research finds that most people are slightly to moderately happy, not unhappy. "There are selfish reasons to behave in altruistic ways", says Gregg Easterbrook, author of "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse".
Feb 27, 06: Scientists say it may be possible to predict how well we will remember something before the event has even taken place. By analyzing scans, they discovered the brain must get into the 'right frame of mind' to store new information. For top performance, the brain must mobilise its resources, not only at the moment we get new information, but also in the seconds before.
Feb 27, 06: Being born very premature can affect a child's personality into adulthood, a study has suggested. Researchers from the Institute of Psychiatry studied 18 and 19-year-olds who had been born early, and compared them to those born at full-term. Premature babies, particularly girls, were found to be more likely to be anxious and withdrawn, and potentially at a higher risk of depression.
. . The results suggested those born prematurely had lower levels of a personality trait called 'extraversion', indicating that they may have less confident and outgoing personalities. They also had higher levels of the personality trait 'neuroticism', which indicates increased anxiety, lower mood and lower self-esteem. Girls' personalities were more likely to be affected by being born early.
Feb 18, 06: When it comes to making tough decisions --don't sweat it, sleep on it-- or so a team of scientists recommends. A Dutch study suggests complex decisions like buying a car can be better made when the unconscious mind is left to churn through the options. This is because people can only focus on a limited amount of information, the study suggests. The conscious brain should be reserved for simple choices like picking between towels and shampoos, the team said.
. . One group was given four minutes to pick a favorite car from a list having weighed up four attributes including fuel consumption and legroom. The other group was given a series of puzzles to keep their conscious selves busy before making a decision. The conscious thought group managed to pick the best car based on four aspects around 55% of the time, while the unconscious thought group only chose the right one 40% of the time. But when the experiment was made more complex by bringing in 12 attributes to weigh up, the conscious thought group's success rate fell to around 23% as opposed to nearly 60% for the unconscious thought group.
Feb 17, 06: Children raised in orphanages are stunted physically, emotionally and intellectually but good foster care can help orphans start to grow again, researchers said. An experiment in which foster homes were set up in Romania showed that children taken out of the country's notorious orphanages began to grow taller and put on weight, gain intellectually and lose the most marked symptoms of depression and anxiety. The researchers said their findings apply to all children in orphanages.
. . They persuaded the Romanian government to place 69 children in foster homes --something that had not existed in Bucharest before. Another 67 had to remain in the orphanage and the researchers compared the two groups. "Their mean IQ score is close to the retarded range compared to community children and compared to standard norms. The good news is ... foster-care children showed increases in IQ at 42 and 54 months (4 1/2 years)." Girls, especially, did well.
. . "You can predict in regular orphanages that you are going to lose one month of growth for every three months in the orphanage", Johnson said. "A three-year-old child will be the size of a two-year-old."
Feb 16, 06: Money doesn't buy happiness, and now there's a study to prove it. Australian researchers found that people in well-off Sydney are among the most miserable in the country, while those in some of the poorest areas are much more satisfied with their lives. "Only at very, very high levels does money actually have any impact to act as a buffer." While there are no extremes of well-being in Australia, the happiest areas had a lower population, more people aged 55 or over, more women, more married people and less income inequality.
Feb 15, 06: When a person over 65 is debilitated, the odds of dying within a year can increase dramatically for the spouse, a new study shows. If a man is diagnosed with dementia, for example, the risk of death skyrockets 28% for his wife over the next year. If it's the woman who suffers dementia, the husband's death risk climbs 22%. The increase in risk varies dramatically by condition, however. The partner of a spouse hospitalized for cancer typically incurs no heightened odds of death. For a stroke, the risk to the partner goes up about 5%. The differences depend largely on how disabling a condition is.
. . The study confirms the "widower effect" that has been shown in other research. For those over age 65, the death of a wife increases a husband's risk of death 53% for 30 days, and the death of a husband increases his wife's risk by 61% during that month, according to the new study. The widower effect over one year amounts to a 21% increased risk of death to a surviving husband and 17% for a surviving wife.
. . But the most significant findings are the social effects of mere hospitalization. "Over the first 30 days, it can be almost as bad for you to have a sick spouse as a dead spouse", Christakis said.
Feb 15, 06: According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I've only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they've correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90% of the time.
Feb 15, 06: When faced with a new learning task, our brains replay events in reverse, much like a video on rewind, a new study suggests.
This type of reverse-replay is also used in artificial intelligence research to help computers make decisions. The finding could explain why we learn tasks more easily if we take frequent study breaks: the pauses between sessions give our brains time to review information.
. . The finding could help explain how rats solve something called the "temporal credit assignment problem." And because the hippocampus in rats and humans perform many of the same functions, the current study suggests that our brains may work in the same way.
. . The problem, a classic dilemma in decision-making theory, is this: If an animal has to perform a sequence of actions before it can get a reward, how does it know which actions were ultimately important and which weren't? Actions performed right before the reward was obtained are easy to identify as important, but what about actions performed at the beginning of the sequence? Which of those were important?
. . If reverse replay also takes place in humans, it could explain why cramming hours before a test doesn't typically work. The new finding suggests that our brains learn best when there are frequent pauses between study sessions; during these breaks, our brains unconsciously reviews the new information several times, making it easier to commit to memory when the time comes.
Adolescent girls abuse drugs and alcohol just as much if not more than boys, a new study indicates.
Feb 6, 06: Angry people are more likely to sustain injuries serious enough to require emergency medical care, and the risk is higher for men than women, says lead author Daniel Vinson of the University of Missouri. Multiple studies bolster the notion that anger poses a health risk by showing it also can trigger coronary heart disease and heart attacks.
. . The study found that nearly 32% of all the patients reported being irritable just before they were injured, 18% reported being angry and 13% reported being hostile. Anger more than quadrupled a person's odds of being injured, while being hostile increased those odds sixfold. For men, Vinson says, the link was particularly clear.
Feb 1, 06: In bad economic times, more people in New York City get hit by subway trains. The unemployed and mentally impaired are the most likely to be struck, a new study reveals, and the number of incidents depends on how well the city is doing economically. Perhaps surprisingly, most suffered relatively minor injuries, such as bruises and scratches or the loss of a finger or toe.
. . But a quarter of the patients had at least one arm or leg amputated and one person lost all four limbs. The limbs were either severed by the train itself or were so mangled that they had to be amputated. About 10% of the patients died in the hospital from their injuries. 80% of the patients were male and the average age was about 39 years old.
Feb 2, 06: A study of 950,000 Swedish men has shown that taller men get a better education, a researcher said. The study could suggest short people are discriminated against as they are expected to be low achievers. "Men taller than 194 cm (6 ft 4 in) were two to three times more likely to obtain a higher education when compared with men shorter than 165 cm."
Jan 30, 06: Imagine suffering from chronic déjà vu ["seen again"]. You don't even go to the doctor because you feel like you've already been there! Psychologist Chris Moulin, who runs a memory clinic at the University of Leeds in the UK, has started the first known study of the condition.
. . Déjà vu hits most of us now and then. We're struck by the sensation that we have experienced an event before, even though we can't fully remember it or perhaps know it didn't really happen. The sensation is fleeting, so researchers can't study it. But Moulin figures chronic déjà vu sufferers offer an opportunity to do research that might unlock the secrets of the everyday variety.
. . The man who thinks he's been to Moulin's clinic even gave details of the visit that never occurred. He has déjà vu so bad that he doesn't watch TV news because he feels like he's seen it all before, Moulin said. Things get tricky when the man is asked to predict what's ahead, however. "When this particular patient's wife asked what was going to happen next on a TV program he'd claimed to have already seen, he said, 'How should I know? I have a memory problem!'"
. . Moulin and colleagues have since found other patients, now that they know what to look for. The condition can cause depression and is sometimes diagnosed as a state of delusion. But Moulin's team believes it to be a dysfunction of memory.
. . "The exciting thing about these people is that they can 'recall' specific details about an event or meeting that never actually occurred", Moulin said. "It suggests that the sensations associated with remembering are separate to the contents of memory, that there are two different systems in the brain at work."
. . The problem might involve a memory circuit that is overactive or stuck in the "on" position. The researchers plan now to use brain scans in an effort to pinpoint the problem.
Jan 20, 06: Schadenfreude means getting pleasure from someone else's misfortune... and men seem to enjoy it more than women. Such is the conclusion reached by scientists at University College London in what they say is the first neuroscientific evidence of schadenfreude.
. . Using brain-imaging techniques, they compared how men and women reacted when watching other people suffer pain. If the sufferer was someone they liked, areas of the brain linked to empathy and pain were activated in both sexes.
. . Women had a similar response if they disliked the person experiencing the pain but men showed a surge in the reward areas of the brain. "The women had a diminished empathic response", said Dr Klaas Enoo Stephan, a co-author of the report. "But it was still there, whereas in the men it was completely absent."
. . The scientists, who reported their findings in the journal Nature, said the research shows that empathic responses in men are shaped by the perceived fairness of others.
Jan 17, 06: Believe it or not, higher education is linked to a greater tendency to believe in ghosts and other paranormal phenomena, according to a new study. Contrary to researchers' expectations, a poll of 439 college students found seniors and grad students were more likely to believe in haunted houses, psychics, telepathy, channeling and a host of other questionable ideas.
. . The results are detailed in the Jan-Feb issue of the Skeptical Inquirer magazine. The survey was modeled after a nationwide Gallup Poll in 2001 that found younger Americans far more likely to believe in the paranormal than older respondents.
. . While 23% of college freshmen expressed a general belief in paranormal concepts -—from astrology to communicating with the dead—- 31% of seniors did so, and the figure jumped to 34% among graduate students.
. . The media are likely responsible for some people's beliefs in alien abductions and other paranormal concepts, the scientists write, based on their survey of existing studies. And some people tend to selectively confirm whatever ideas might be in their heads. Even smart people might believe in something offbeat because, in part, they're good at defending whatever they believe.
Jan 5, 06: Analysis of stencilled handprints found on the walls of an Indonesian cave suggest that prehistoric men and women chose not to mix genders when it came to this enigmatic art form. Experts from France's National center for Scientific Research (CNRS) looked at handprints left at the Gua Masri II cave in Indonesia, using a new computer model to determine whether the hand which made the mark was male or female. "This discovery supports evidence put forward by ethnologists showing that prehistoric man had different rituals than women."
Dec 22, 05: To recall memories, your brain travels back in time via the ultimate Google search, according to a new study in which scientists found they can monitor the activity and actually predict what you'll think of next.
. . The work bolsters the validity of a longstanding hypothesis that the human brain takes itself back to the state it was in when a memory was first formed. The researchers found that the patterns of brain activity associated with each picture "reinstated" themselves seconds before the people could verbally recall the memories. On average, the time between beginning brain activity associated with the memory and the subjects verbally stating the memory was about 5.4 seconds.
. . When trying to remember a face you saw recently, for example, you might first think broadly about faces and then narrow your search from there, enlisting new details as you go, Polyn explained. It's like adding more and more specific keywords to a Google search, until finally you find what you want. Scientists call this process "contextual reinstatement." [ also: "State-Dependent Learning"]
. . By comparing the brain scans of the subjects while they tried to remember the images they'd seen with those collected when they first viewed the images, the researchers were able to correctly conclude whether the people were going to remember a celebrity, place or object. "We can see some evidence of what category the subject is trying to recall before they even say anything, so we think we're visualizing the search process itself."
Dec 12, 05: The brain responds emotionally and often illogically when forced to make decisions based on little or conflicting evidence, a new study suggests. These types of choices are known as ambiguous decisions and are different from risky decisions.
. . In a risky decision, a person is uncertain about the outcome of their choice but has an idea of the probability of success. In an ambiguous decision, a person is ignorant of both factors. "Psychologists would say ambiguity is the discomfort from knowing there is something you don't know that you wish you did."
. . A correlation between aversion to ambiguous decisions and activation of emotional parts of the brain makes sense from an evolutionary point of view, Camerer said. "Freezing in the face of danger is an old, emotional response which probably was evolutionarily adaptive in our ancestral past." In the modern human brain, this translates into a reluctance to bet on or against an event if it seems at all ambiguous.
Dec 5, 05: Abnormal activity in neurons that help individuals imitate others may underlie some of the social deficits found in autism, US researchers believe. A Nature Neuroscience study found autistic children had less brain activation in an area involved in understanding others' state of mind. The degree of activation of the 'mirror neurons' housed in this area correlated with measures of social impairment. The lower the activation, the stronger the impairment the children had.
. . In animals, mirror neurons have been shown to fire both when the animal observes another performing an act and when they perform the same act themselves.
Nov 27, 05: When you forget a face or can't find your car keys, it's not because your brain is out of storage space. You just aren't filtering out other thoughts well enough, a new study finds. The research contradicts a popular notion that memory capacity is solely dependent on how much information you can cram into your noggin. Rather, it shows that if you can disregard some of what you see, you'll do a better job remembering the visual input you deem important.
Nov 15, 05: Children born during the first three months of the year are more likely to make good grades than children born towards the end of the year, according to a new Norwegian study. The report, which also showed that boys born late in the year were more likely to have problems making friends, did not delve into the reasons for the differences.
Nov 14, 05: An ancient brewery from a vanished empire was staffed by elite women who were selected for their beauty or nobility, a new study concludes. The finding adds to other evidence that women played a more crucial role in ancient Andean societies than history books have stated. It may also in some ways reflect modern drinking traditions in the Andean mountains, where women get drunk as much as men, researchers say.
. . The brewery, on a mountaintop in southern Peru, cranked out hundreds of gallons of beer every week. The 1,000-year-old facility was part of the Wari empire, which predated the Incas.
Nov 14, 05: Meditation alters brain patterns in ways that are likely permanent, scientists have known. But a new study shows key parts of the brain actually get thicker through the practice.
. . Brain imaging of regular working folks who meditate regularly revealed increased thickness in cortical regions related to sensory, auditory and visual perception, as well as internal perception --the automatic monitoring of heart rate or breathing, for example.
. . The study also indicates that regular meditation may slow age-related thinning of the frontal cortex.
Nov 3, 05: If you show someone a mouse and a cat and ask which is smaller, they'll quickly reply, "the mouse." Ask which is bigger, and it takes most people slightly longer to respond. This rule, known to scientists from actual tests on people, is known as "semantic congruity", and it also holds true for comparing numbers and distances.
. . Until now, scientists thought the rule was rooted in our language abilities. But in a recent study by researchers at Duke University, a group of monkeys have shown a similar ability to tell the difference between large and small groups of dots.
Nov 4, 05: Anger is good for you, as long as you keep it below a boil, according to new psychology research based on face reading. People who respond to stressful situations with short-term anger or indignation have a sense of control and optimism that lacks in those who respond with fear. The findings were the same for men and women.
. . "These are the most exciting data I've ever collected", Carnegie Mellon psychologist Jennifer Lerner told a gathering of science writers.
. . People who reacted with anger were more optimistic about risk and more likely to favor an aggressive response to terrorism.
. . So in maddening situations in which anger or indignation are justified, anger is not a bad idea, the thinking goes. In fact, it's adaptive, Lerner says, and it's a healthier response than fear. Chronic, explosive anger or a hostile outlook on the world is still bad for you, contributing to heart disease and high blood pressure, research shows.
. . The new research supports the idea that humans have more than one uniform response to stress and that fear and anger provoke different responses from our nervous systems and the parts of our brain, such as the pituitary, that deal with tough situations.
Oct 31, 05: A team of Israeli scientists has discovered a very innovative way to detect people suffering from anxiety disorders but who appear to be healthy. A simple blood test will reveal if you're unable to handle stress and if you need a medical treatment without the need for any psychological advice. Such a simple test would be particularly helpful for soldiers returning from war zones or for people having being subjected to severe stress, such as after terrorist attacks or natural disasters. This blood test should be available next year. But the researchers are already working on another diagnosis tool, this one for depression.
In a 1989 Scientific American article, an American biochemist named Wilfred Arnold hypothesized that Van Gogh's insanity (acute intermittent porphyria, he speculated) was caused by the thujone in absinthe.
Oct 27, 05: Beauty may only be skin deep, but it's apparently enough to carry an election, a new study says. Handsome male candidates had a 56% chance of winning an election while their less dashing counterparts had a 44% chance.
. . "It was very clear that being good-looking helped and also helped more for men than for women, and that seems to be something one finds in looking at the effect of beauty in other outcomes such as earnings and wages."
Oct 25, 05: Prepare to be remotely controlled. Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp., Japans top telephone company, says it is developing the technology to perhaps make video games more realistic. But more sinister applications also come to mind. Imagine it being added to militaries' arsenals of so-called "non-lethal" weapons.
. . A special headset was placed on my head. It sent a very low voltage electric current from the back of my ears through my head — either from left to right or right to left, depending on which way the joystick on a remote-control was moved.
. . The technology is called galvanic vestibular stimulation — essentially, electricity messes with the delicate nerves inside the ear that help maintain balance. The very low level of electricity required for the effect is unlikely to cause any health damage, Collins said.
. . Researchers say they were able to make a person walk along a route in the shape of a giant pretzel using this technique. It's a mesmerizing sensation similar to being drunk or melting into sleep under the influence of anesthesia. But it's more definitive, as though an invisible hand were reaching inside your brain.
. . NTT says the feature may be used in video games and amusement park rides, although there are no plans so far for a commercial product.
Oct 17, 05: Pathological liars may have structural abnormalities in their brains, a new study suggests. They found that individuals who habitually lied and cheated had less gray matter and more white matter in their prefrontal cortex than normal people.
. . Past studies have found that the prefrontal cortex shows heightened activity when normal people lie, and it is believed to be involved in both learning moral behavior and feeling remorse.
. . Because gray matter consists of brain cells, while white matter forms the "wiring" or connections between these cells, pathological liars may have more capacity to lie and fewer moral restraints, the authors suggest. "They've got the equipment to lie, and they don't have the disinhibition that the rest of us have in telling the big whoppers."
. . Liars had 26% more white matter in their prefrontal cortex than people with antisocial personality disorder, and 22% more than normal people. But they had 14% less gray matter than normal individuals. Interestingly, the researchers note, autistic people --who are known to have difficulty lying-- show a shift in gray-to-white matter ratio opposite to that seen among liars in the current study.
Oct 8, 05: Americans are assertive, Italians are very passionate, and Germans are the picture of efficiency. Right?
. . Such national stereotypes are common, but they are highly mistaken, a new study shows.
. . There's an old joke that goes something like this: How do you get three Canadians out of a swimming pool? The answer: You ask them. "Meaning they'll do what they're told", says researcher Robert McCrae, a psychologist at the National Institute of Aging.
. . Yet the stereotypes of Americans as assertive and Canadians as submissive are illusions, McCrae said. Both groups scored almost identically on measures of assertiveness in the study.
. . Another stereotype that was debunked was that of Czechs being antagonistic and disagreeable. Not only was this how other groups described Czechs, it was how Czechs describe themselves. Yet in the study by McCrae and his colleagues, Czechs scored higher on altruism and modesty than most people from other countries.
. . The researchers suggest that national stereotypes are social constructs that emerge from the historical experiences of a people, their mythology, literature, social values and policy.
Oct 8, 05: Americans are assertive, Italians are very passionate, and Germans are the picture of efficiency. Right?
. . Such national stereotypes are common, but they are highly mistaken, a new study shows.
. . There's an old joke that goes something like this: How do you get three Canadians out of a swimming pool? The answer: You ask them. "Meaning they'll do what they're told", says researcher Robert McCrae, a psychologist at the National Institute of Aging.
. . Yet the stereotypes of Americans as assertive and Canadians as submissive are illusions, McCrae said. Both groups scored almost identically on measures of assertiveness in the study.
. . Another stereotype that was debunked was that of Czechs being antagonistic and disagreeable. Not only was this how other groups described Czechs, it was how Czechs describe themselves. Yet in the study by McCrae and his colleagues, Czechs scored higher on altruism and modesty than most people from other countries.
. . The researchers suggest that national stereotypes are social constructs that emerge from the historical experiences of a people, their mythology, literature, social values and policy.
Oct 8, 05: Do you always get what you ask for? Swedish researchers showed a pair of female faces to 120 volunteers for 2 seconds and then asked them to choose which one they thought was more attractive. The researchers then asked the volunteers to explain their choice.
. . The trial was repeated 15 times for each volunteer, using different pairs of faces. but in three of the trials the faces were secretly switched after a decision had been made.
. . Surprisingly, not only were a large number of the volunteers oblivious to the switch when ultimately allowed to take a longer look at their choice, they were actually able to gave detailed explanations for why they preferred the face that, indeed, they had actually rejected.
. . It would be asking for an apple and then explaining exactly why you wanted the banana you got instead. The researchers call the phenomenon "choice blindness."
Oct 2, 05: Your brain never stops working. But it does cease talking to itself when you lose consciousness, a new study shows. Scientists have long wondered what the brain does and doesn't do during deep sleep. It remains active, they know. So what's the difference between consciousness and the lack of it?
. . When we're awake, different parts of the brain use chemicals and nerve cells to communicate constantly across the entire network, similar to the perpetual flow of data between all the different computers, routers and servers that make up the Internet.
. . In the deepest part of sleep, however, the various nodes of your cranial Internet all lose their connections. "The brain breaks down into little islands that can't talk to one another", said study leader Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
. . Consciousness has long mystified scientists. The new finding suggests that it depends on the brain's ability to integrate information, Tononi says. The compartmentalization might also help the brain's synapses, which make all the connections that give us thought, to take a break, according to Tononi's colleague, Marcello Massimini.
Sept 27, 05: A scientist at the Medical University of South Carolina has found that magnetic resonance imaging machines also can serve as lie detectors. The study found MRI machines, which are used to take images of the brain, are more than 90% accurate at detecting deception.
. . That compares with polygraphs that range from 80% to "no better than chance" at finding the truth, said Dr. Mark George, a distinguished professor of psychiatry, radiology and neurosciences. The study using 60 healthy men. They offered some extra money if they could manage to trick the machine but none could.
Sept 21, 05: More than 20% of women in Mauritania, which straddles black and Arab Africa, were force-fed as young girls, according to a government survey from 2001, the latest available. "Our society has [a] vision that a woman has to be fat to be beautiful. It is a canon of beauty", said Marienne Baba Sy, head of a government commission that deals with women's issues.
. . The force-feeding technique known as "gavage" --a French word more closely associated with fattening up geese to produce foie gras-- is less widely practised than it used to be after the government launched campaigns to highlight the health risks.
. . Having a voluptuous wife and daughters --well fed to survive the rigors of a desert lifestyle-- was long a visible sign of wealth and power among the country's light-skinned Moors. It is still seen by many as a canon of beauty.
. . But with Lebanese satellite television broadcasting images of flat-stomached girls cavorting on beaches, and more Mauritanians traveling abroad, the vogue is starting to change.
. . "Gavage" left some women struggling to walk, not just because of their weight --which often tops 90 kg (198 lb)-- but because they were tortured as they were force-fed. Some had their fingers or toes broken so the pain would distract them from having to swallow the milk and porridge. Others had their feet crushed by a "zayar" --a wooden vice which would only be loosened once they ate.
. . Some children were tied down while being fed and were forced to eat whatever they vomited up during the ordeal, Baba Sy said. The force-feeding often lasted years.
. . The 2001 survey estimated around 10% of women aged 15-19 were force-fed as young girls, down from 35% among 45-54 year-olds.
Sept 21, 05: American adults are liars, at least when it comes to washing their hands. In a recent telephone survey, 91% of the subjects claimed they always washed their hands after using public restrooms. But, when researchers observed people leaving public restrooms, only 83% actually did so. Only 75% of men washed their hands compared to 90% of women.
. . In contrast, low percentages of people wash their hands after petting a cat or dog (43%), after handling money (21%), after sneezing or coughing (32%).
. . Fifteen seconds of scrubbing with soap and water or a good rubbing with a hand sanitizer greatly reduce the amount of infective crud on your hands.
. . Sports fans at Turner Field in Atlanta, particularly the guys, had the worst hand hygiene habits –only 74% of all patrons washed their hands (84% of the women and 63% of the men).
. . San Francisco turned out to be the most hygiene-conscious city in the study --88%.
Sept 19, 05: A team of U.S. scientists has found the emotionally impaired are more willing to gamble for high stakes and that people with brain damage may make good financial decisions, the Times newspaper reported.
. . In a study of investors' behavior, 41 people with normal IQs were asked to play a simple investment game. Fifteen of the group had suffered lesions on the areas of the brain that affect emotions.
. . The result was those with brain damage outperformed those without. The scientists found emotions led some of the group to avoid risks even when the potential benefits far outweighed the losses, a phenomenon known as myopic loss aversion.
. . One of the researchers, Antione Bechara, an associate professor of neurology at the University of Iowa, said the best stock market investors might plausibly be called "functional psychopaths."
Sept 14, 05: Nobody knows how many people sit wrongfully convicted in prison due to errors in fingerprint matching. But a new study suggests there could be a thousand or more unknown identification errors a year in the United States.
. . Other studies have shown an error rate of 0.8% in matching prints. Multiplied across all cases processed by U.S. crime labs in 2002, that would be 1,900 mistaken fingerprint matches.
. . Cole says the public is led to believe that fingerprint analysis is infallible. "Rather than blindly insisting there is zero error in fingerprint matching, we should acknowledge the obvious, study the errors openly and find constructive ways to prevent faulty evidence from being used to convict innocent people."
Sept 8, 05: History suggests that the line between creativity and madness is a fine one, but a small group of people known as schizotypes are able to walk it with few problems and even benefit from it. A new study confirms that their enhanced creativity may come from using more of the right side of the brain than the rest of us.
. . In the spectrum between normal and insane, schizotypes generally fall somewhere in the middle. While they do not suffer many of the symptoms affecting schizophrenics, including paranoia, hallucinations and incoherent thoughts, schizotypes often exhibit their own eccentricities.
. . "They may dress or carry themselves in a strange way", says Bradley Folley, a graduate student in clinical psychology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee and the lead author of the study. "They're not abnormal, they live normal lives but they often have idiosyncratic ways of thinking. Certain things may have special meaning for them or they may be more spiritually attuned." The researchers defined creativity as the ability to generate something new and useful from existing products or ideas.
. . The link between creativity and psychosis has largely been based on anecdotal evidence and correlation studies. The Vanderbilt study is the first to investigate the creative process experimentally using brain-imaging techniques. The scans showed that both sides of the brain in all three groups were active when making novel associations. However, in the brains of schizotypes, the activation of the right hemisphere was much higher compared to brains of the control subjects.
. . Folley speculates that what may be happening is that schizotypes may either have more access to the right hemisphere than the average population or there may be more efficient communication between the two hemispheres.
Sept 8, 05: Teenage angst and clashes with authority may be caused by changes in youngsters' brains during puberty, but luckily for harassed parents, the problems pass.
. . The ability of boys and girls to decode social cues and recognize emotions, particularly anger and sadness, dips between the ages of 12 and 14, researchers at University College London and the Institute of Child Health have discovered. "It would appear that this is a function of the development of their brain at that time. It is a real biologically based phenomenon from which, fortunately, they recover." So rather than rebellious teenagers being deliberately obstinate or difficult, their brains may be unable to detect subtle signs from parents, teachers and other adults or to decode them correctly.
. . The same brain circuits involved in recognizing facial expression are also associated with processing tone of voice, according to Skuse. "The ability to interpret your irritated tone of voice, the ability to interpret your angry facial expression may well deteriorate during that period of early adolescence", he added. But the problem seems to disappear by the age of 16 or 17.
. . They found the dip during puberty while studying 6,000 children as part of his research into autism, a condition that affects far more boys than girls.
Aug 22, 05: Asians and North Americans really do see the world differently. Shown a photograph, North American students of European background paid more attention to the object in the foreground of a scene, while students from China spent more time studying the background and taking in the whole scene, according to University of Michigan researchers. [This gives insight to Zen, etc!! ]
. . They believe the differences are cultural. "Asians live in a more socially complicated world than we do. They have to pay more attention to others than we do. We are individualists. We can be bulls in a china shop, they can't afford it." And that, he said, goes back to the ecology and economy of times thousands of years ago. In ancient China, farmers developed a system of irrigated agriculture, Nisbett said. Rice farmers had to get along with each other to share water and make sure no one cheated.
. . Western attitudes, on the other hand, developed in ancient Greece where there were more people running individual farms, raising grapes and olives, and operating like individual businessmen. So differences in perception go back at least 2,000 years, he said.
. . Aristotle, for example, focused on objects. A rock sank in water because it had the property of gravity, wood floated because it had the property of floating. He would not have mentioned the water. The Chinese, though, considered all actions related to the medium in which they occurred, so they understood tides and magnetism long before the West did.
. . The Japanese gave 60% more information on the background and twice as much about the relationship between background and foreground objects as Americans.
. . Reinforcing the belief that the differences are cultural --when Asians raised in North America were studied, they were intermediate between native Asians and European-Americans, and sometimes closer to Americans in the way they viewed scenes.
There's new technology coming out of the MIT called the "Jerk-O-Meter." The software measures stress levels in your voice and rates you on a scale of zero to 100 to let you know just how annoying you might be sounding. It uses speech patterns to measure interest in conversations. The result is speech software that measures vocal activity and stress during a call and then translates that into a couple of actions. The group is also working on better reading empathy.
Aug 20, 05: Most studies done on violence and video games support the conclusion that violent video games can increase aggressive behavior in children and adolescents, especially boys, researchers said.
Aug 16, 05: The best strategy for advertisers trying to reach skeptical consumers: Leave the facts out. A new study finds emotional ads work best for this group.
. . But don't try to get cozy with the cynics. Researchers showed test subjects eight TV ads, four that had emotional themes emphasizing the brand and providing relatively little actual information. An emotional ad for a wine company emphasized a familial atmosphere at the winery and surrounding vineyards.
. . The other four were more factual. An ad for dishwashing liquid showed how effectively the product removed baked-on foods. Surprisingly, said the researchers, subjects who described themselves highly skeptical of all ads were persuaded less by informational ads than they were by emotional ads.
. . On the flip side, those who were less skeptical were more responsive to the info-based ads. "Skepticism leads to less attention to and reliance on advertising, and generally a decreased chance that the consumer will purchase the advertised product." The skeptical bunch is more likely to zip past ads on recorded programs or switch channels during commercials, the study found.
. . They react differently from another group, called the cynics. "The advertising skeptic regards advertising as not credible, and therefore, not worth processing", said MacLachlan. "A cynical consumer is critical of advertising because of its manipulative intent and indirect appeals. Such consumers may prefer simple, direct, informative advertising."
Aug 11, 05: When people see violent or erotic images, they fail to process whatever they see next, according to new research. Scientists are calling the effect "attentional rubbernecking." "We observed that people fail to detect visual images that appeared one-fifth of a second after emotional images, whereas they can detect those images with little problem after viewing neutral images", said Vanderbilt University psychologist David Zald.
. . The effect is akin to rubbernecking on the highway, Zald and his colleagues say. Your brain might suggest you watch the road ahead, but your emotions force you to look at the accident on the side of the road. "This suggests that emotionally arousing images impact attention in similar ways whether they are perceived as positive or negative." The researchers suspect we can't control the effect.
Aug 8, 05: At a physics meeting last October, Nobel laureate David Gross outlined 25 questions in science that he thought physics might help answer. One of the Gross's questions involved human consciousness. He wondered whether scientists would ever be able to measure the onset of consciousness in infants, and speculated that consciousness might be similar to what physicists call a "phase transition", an abrupt and sudden large-scale transformation resulting from several microscopic changes. The emergence of superconductivity in certain metals when cooled below a critical temperature is an example of a phase transition.
. . It wasn't that long ago that the study of consciousness was considered to be too abstract, too subjective or too difficult to study scientifically. But in recent years, it has emerged as one of the hottest new fields in biology, similar to string theory in physics or the search for extraterrestrial life in astronomy.
. . No longer the sole purview of philosophers and mystics, consciousness is now attracting the attention of scientists from across a variety of different fields, each, it seems, with their own theories about what consciousness is and how it arises from the brain.
. . In many religions, consciousness is closely tied to the ancient notion of the soul, the idea that in each of us, there exists an immaterial essence that survives death and perhaps even predates birth. It was believed that the soul was what allowed us to think and feel, remember and reason. Our personality, our individuality and our humanity were all believed to originate from the soul. Nowadays, these things are generally attributed to physical processes in the brain, but exactly how chemical and electrical signals between trillions of brain cells called neurons are transformed into thoughts, emotions and a sense of self is still unknown.
. . Chalmers is best known for distinguishing between the 'easy' problems of consciousness and the 'hard' problem. The easy problems are those that deal with functions and behaviors associated with consciousness and include questions such as these: How does perception occur? How does the brain bind different kinds of sensory information together to produce the illusion of a seamless experience? "Those are what I call the easy problems, not because they're trivial, but because they fall within the standard methods of the cognitive sciences", Chalmers says.
. . The hard problem for Chalmers is that of subjective experience. "You have a different kind of experience --a different quality of experience-- when you see red, when you see green, when you hear middle C, when you taste chocolate", Chalmers told LiveScience. "Whenever you're conscious, whenever you have a subjective experience, it feels like something."
. . According to Chalmers, the subjective nature of consciousness prevents it from being explained in terms of simpler components, a method used to great success in other areas of science. He believes that unlike most of the physical world, which can be broken down into individual atoms, or organisms, which can be understood in terms of cells, consciousness is an irreducible aspect of the universe, like space and time and mass. "Those things in a way didn't need to evolve", said Chalmers. "They were part of the fundamental furniture of the world all along."
. . Instead of trying to reduce consciousness to something else, Chalmers believes consciousness should simply be taken for granted, the way that space and time and mass are in physics. According to this view, a theory of consciousness would not explain what consciousness is or how it arose; instead, it would try to explain the relationship between consciousness and everything else in the world. Not everyone is enthusiastic about this idea, however.
. . . "It's not very helpful", said Susan Greenfield, a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University. "You can't do very much with it", Greenfield points out. "It's the last resort, because what can you possibly do with that idea? You can't prove it or disprove it, and you can't test it. It doesn't offer an explanation, or any enlightenment, or any answers about why people feel the way they feel."
. . Greenfield's own theory of consciousness is influenced by her experience working with drugs and mental diseases. Unlike some other scientists --most notably the late Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and his colleague David Koch, a professor of computation and neural systems at Caltech-- who believed that different aspects of consciousness like visual awareness are encoded by specific neurons, Greenfield thinks that consciousness involves large groups of nonspecialized neurons scattered throughout the brain.
. . Important for Greenfield's theory is a distinction between 'consciousness' and 'mind,' terms that she says many of her colleagues use interchangeably, but which she believes are two entirely different concepts. According to Greenfield, the mind is made up of the physical connections between neurons. These connections evolve slowly and are influenced by our past experiences and therefore, everyone's brain is unique. But whereas the mind is rooted in the physical connections between neurons, Greenfield believes that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, similar to the 'wetness' of water or the 'transparency' of glass, both of which are properties that are the result of --that is, they emerge from-- the actions of individual molecules.
. . For Greenfield, a conscious experience occurs when a stimulus --either external, like a sensation, or internal, like a thought or a memory-- triggers a chain reaction within the brain. Like in an earthquake, each conscious experience has an epicenter, and ripples from that epicenter travels across the brain, recruiting neurons as they go.
. . Mind and consciousness are connected in Greenfield's theory because the strength of a conscious experience is determined by the mind and the strength of its existing neuronal connections --connections forged from past experiences.
. . Part of the mystery and excitement about consciousness is that scientists don't know what form the final answer will take. "If I said to you I'd solved the hard problem, you wouldn't be able to guess whether it would be a formula, a model, a sensation, or a drug", said Greenfield. "What would I be giving you?"
Aug 2, 05: The best way to lay off that desert may be to pretend it makes you sick. Researchers have found that when adults are given "false memories" of getting sick from eating strawberry ice cream as a child, they may choose not to eat it as an adult.
. . "We believe this new finding may have significant implications for dieting", said study author Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California, Irvine. "While we know food preferences developed in childhood continue into adulthood, this work suggests that the mere belief one had a negative experience could be sufficient to influence food choices as an adult." [She's well-known in the field of memory.]
July 28, 05: New research shows that we have a hard time letting go of fears associated with members of a different race. This apparent predisposition was reduced in those who had been involved in interracial dating.
. . The basic experiment paired mild electric shocks with pictures of male faces, as well as various animals. When the shocks were removed, the subjects continued to react fearfully to the faces of a different race. "What was most surprising for me was that the responses were equal for black and white participants", said Elizabeth Phelps from New York University. "In our culture, we have certain stereotypes, which might make you expect a white person to hold onto negative associations with black males. But black persons had a similar reaction toward white males."
. . As previous experiments have shown, images of snakes and spiders elicited a response even after the shocks stopped, while the negative emotional reaction to birds and butterflies quickly subsided. This bias toward different animals is thought to be inherent as opposed to learned. Humans who were born wary of snakes and spiders had a better chance to survive. An evolutionary basis is supported by other research with primates. Lab monkeys, who had never seen a real snake in their life, showed persistent fear of a toy snake, but not a toy bunny.
. . The emergence of separate races happened relatively recently - by some estimates, between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Geographic isolation is thought to have been necessary, so early humans would have had little interaction with other races. There would have been no reason to acquire an inherent racial suspicion. Therefore, the responses in the lab are --at least partly-- culturally influenced.
. . It turned out that the only factor that had any correlation with the fear responses was the amount of interracial dating. Those subjects who had more contact with the opposite race through dating exhibited less of the fear bias towards the outgroup.
. . It is impossible to say from these results whether those who have experienced interracial dating start out with less of a fearful predisposition, or whether they learn to be less fearful of the other race through the close contact.
July 26, 05: A new study finds some people under interrogation will confess to crimes they did not commit, either to end the questioning or because they become convinced they did it. An unrelated study last year found it is fairly easy to create false memories in people in a lab setting. Lack of sleep and isolation contribute to false confessions, the scientists say in the new study. A suspect's mental status and lack of education play roles.
. . Police are often not qualified to judge truth versus deception, the researchers argue. The scientists call for videotaping of confessions so they can be properly analyzed by experts.
July 16, 05: A new survey on religious beliefs found half of all American adults believe in ghosts, almost a third believe in astrology and more than a quarter believe in reincarnation. [What the hell's wrong with us?! --if you believe in that 'hell' kinda thing...]
. . 51% of the public, including 58% of women, believe in ghosts, according to a Harris Poll. 31% of the public believe in astrology, including 36% of women, and 27% believe in reincarnation. Among the younger group, 65% believe in ghosts, while just 27% of the seniors hold that belief. 43% of those aged 25 to 29 believe in astrology, but only 17% of people aged 65 and over, and 25% of men.
. . Belief in reincarnation is held by 40% of people aged 25 to 29 but only 14% of people aged 65 and over. Majorities of about two-thirds of all adults believe in hell and the devil, but few expect that they will go to hell themselves, Harris said.
. . The survey also indicated that women are more likely than men to hold both Christian and non-Christian beliefs. Blacks are more likely than whites and Hispanics to hold Christian beliefs, as are Republicans. The level of belief generally is highest among people without a college education and lowest among those with postgraduate degrees.
. . The 90% of adults who believe in God include 93% of women, 96% of blacks and 93% of Republicans but only 86% of men, 85% of those with postgraduate degrees, and 87% of political independents.
. . The 84% of the public who believe in miracles falls to 72% among those with postgraduate degrees and rises to 90% among women and 90% among blacks. The 82% who believe in heaven includes 89% of women but only 75% of men and falls to 71% among people aged 25 to 29 and those with postgraduate degrees. The survey also found that 68% of the public believes in the devil, and 69% believe in hell.
. . On almost all the beliefs that are central to Christianity, there is a general pattern that indicates higher levels of belief among women than among men; lower level of belief among people aged 25 to 29; higher levels of belief among people with no college education and lower levels of belief among those with postgraduate education; and higher levels of belief among African-Americans than among whites and Hispanics.
. . Harris said that one of its more intriguing findings is that not all people who call themselves Christians believe all the conventional Christian beliefs. For example, 1% of Christians do not believe in God, 8% do not believe in the survival of the soul after death, 7% do not believe in miracles, 5% do not believe in heaven, 7% do not believe in the Virgin birth and 18% do not believe in hell.
. . Even more surprising, according to Harris, is that some people who say they are not Christian believe in the resurrection of Christ, 26%, and the Virgin birth, 27%. Most of the 84% of the public who believe in the survival of the soul after death expect to go to heaven. 63%, including 75% of people who identify as Christians, believe that is their destiny. Only 1% expect to go to hell. 6% expect to go to purgatory, while 11% expect to go somewhere else, and 18% don't know.
July 13, 05: A new robot is so lifelike that roboticists may want to start working on a Bladerunner-style Voight-Kampff test now. Repliee Q1 has silicone for skin, rather than hard plastic. It has a number of sensors to allow it to react in a manner that appears natural; it appears to flutter its eyelids, chest movements correspond to breathing, and other tiny shifts in position that mimic unconscious human movement. The android can mimic actions made by a human; this helps the robot's movements appear more lifelike. By facing a person with reflective dots placed at key points (like wrist, elbow, palm), the robot can try to match those points on its own body with those of the person who is "modeling" human movement.
. . The Voight-Kampff test attempts to distinguish androids from human beings by autonomic responses to questions that should elicit an empathic response. Because it seeks to gather and measure biological information for security purposes, the empathy testing procedure is a kind of biometric identification system.
. . Voight-Kampff Empathy Test: A test consisting of a set of images and questions, asked while the subject's biometric data are gathered. [This is the test done by Ford's character in "Blade Runner".]
July 13, 05: "Even people with good inhibitory ability were likely to behave inappropriately when distracted", von Hippel said. "This suggests that our ability to suppress our true feelings is disrupted under demanding conditions."
. . Von Hippel wanted to know if some people are more prone than others to sticking their own foot in their mouth, figuratively speaking, and what circumstances might contribute to the problematic social "disease." Von Hippel says it's well known that the old and the very young are more prone to what many consider social blunders. "However, this new research suggests that important variations occur in the general population in this inhibitory ability --some of us are naturally better at holding our tongue than others."
June 22, 05: The brains of players of violent video games react as if the violence were real, a study has suggested. They studied the brain patterns of 13 men aged 18 to 26 who, on average, played video games for two hours a day. Wired up to a scanner, they were asked to play a game involving navigating through a complicated bunker, killing attackers and rescuing hostages.
. . Mathiak found that as violence became imminent, the cognitive parts of the brain became active and that during a fight, emotional parts of the brain were shut down. The pattern was the same as that seen in subjects who have had brain scans during other simulated violent situations. It suggests that video games are a "training for the brain to react with this pattern", Mathiak says.
. . Whether violent videos make people more aggressive though is hard to prove, the magazine noted. Studies have suggested players of violent games are in fact more aggressive but have left open the question of whether the games made them that way.
June 2, 05: [A new excuse, kids!] A comprehensive review of academic performance around the world gives bad marks to excessive homework. Teachers in Japan, the Czech Republic and Denmark assign relatively little homework, yet students there score well, researchers said. "At the other end of the spectrum, countries with very low average scores --Thailand, Greece, Iran-- have teachers who assign a great deal of homework."
May 31, 05: An anthropomorphic cyberhuckster --a "digital agent" -- a computer-generated man or woman-- featured moving lips and blinking eyes on a head that nodded and swayed realistically. But unbeknownst to the test subjects, the head movements weren't random. In half the sessions, the computer was programmed to mimic the student's movements exactly, with a precise four-second delay; if a test subject tilted her head thoughtfully and looked up at a 15-degree angle, the computer would repeat the gesture four seconds later.
. . Students liked the mimicking agent more than the recorded agent, rating the former more friendly, interesting, honest and persuasive. They also paid better attention to the parroting presenter, looking away less often. Most significantly, they were more likely to come around to the mimicking agent's way of thinking on the issue.
. . A single speaker --whether an AI or a human avatar-- could mimic a thousand people at once, undetected, transforming a cheap salesman's trick into a tool of mass influence.
May 27, 05: We've all had tunes stuck in our heads. Some of them remind us of childhood friends, places or events. A new study backs the obvious notion that a song can evoke strong memories. It also reveals that you don't even have to hear a song for the past to come flooding back.
. . The new study involved 124 people, average age 19, who were asked to choose from a list of old songs and pick the one that evoked the strongest memory. One group just saw the title, another saw the lyrics, the third saw the album cover or a photo of the artist. A fourth group heard a snippet of the song. The participants ranked the vividness of their memories. Kellaris found that 99% of the 1,000 people he surveyed reported having songs lodged in their noggins. Nearly half said it happens frequently.
. . A simple song with lots of repetition and an unexpected shift is among the most likely to bedevil you, Kellaris says. Down the road, it creates a "cognitive itch". "The only way to 'scratch' a cognitive itch is to rehearse the responsible tune mentally", Kellaris said. "The process may start involuntarily, as the brain detects an incongruity or something 'exceptional' in the musical stimulus. The ensuing mental repetition may exacerbate the 'itch,' such that the mental rehearsal becomes largely involuntary, and the individual feels trapped in a cycle or feedback loop."
. . Scientists are beginning to figure out what's behind the insanity. A study earlier this year used brain scans to reveal that musical memories are stored in the brain's auditory cortex. It also showed that you continue to hear a familiar song in our head when the music stops playing. "We found that people couldn't help continuing the song in their heads, and when they did this, the auditory cortex remained active even though the music had stopped."
. . The researchers were surprised to find a difference in how we recall songs with words versus instrumentals. When the mute button was hit during the word-free theme from the Pink Panther (sorry to do that again) people relied on many different parts of the auditory cortex to fill in the blanks. Fewer brain parts were required to continue "hearing" songs with words. "It makes us think that lyrics might be the focus of the memory."
May 27, 05: Laughter soothes the wounded heart, lightens an awkward moment and, according to recent research, places an emotional emphasis on the words we say. Even better, when someone laughs with us, relationships grow. "Current research on laughter in general shows it's more about communicating emotion than about humor", says Carl Marci, lead author of a paper.
. . The study measured laughter in therapy sessions. Patients regularly laughed at themselves, which suggests "the patient who is laughing is trying to say more than has been expressed verbally to the therapist", Marci said. "Laughter is an indication that the subject is emotionally charged." So... therapists should explore the meaning of what is said immediately preceding laughter.
A little humor can brighten your outlook, a new study suggests. People who watched a 15-minute comedy video scored higher on a survey of hopefulness compared to those who didn't get the chance.
. . Previous studies have revealed laughter is good medicine. A report released last month from the University of Maryland Medical Center found laughter makes blood vessels function better, causing the tissue that lines the vessels to expand, increasing blood flow. A previous study at the same institution concluded that laughter and an active sense of humor may protect against heart attacks. Other surveys have found that humor can relieve stress and contribute to a person's overall well-being.
. . But why would humor foster hope? Maybe just by inhibiting negative thoughts, said Texas A&M psychologist David H. Rosen, one of the new paper's authors. Laugher can stimulate thought and cause you to toss out automatic behavioral responses in favor of more creative pursuits, Rosen said. That leads to a greater sense of self worth and a tendency to develop plans of attack for dealing with problems.
Optimists get the last laugh, according to a new study that shows their hearts stay healthy longer than those of grumps. People who described themselves as highly optimistic a decade ago had lower rates of death from cardiovascular disease and lower overall death rates than strong pessimists, the research found. Major depression was already a known risk factor for heart problems.
May 26, 05: Flowers make people happy. And while that might seem obvious, there hasn't been much research to prove the point until now. A trio of new studies by Rutgers University scientists supports the notion pretty strongly, and the experts go on to speculate that flowers have flourished on this planet, with their beauty evolving in recent millennia, partly because humans are so attached to them.
. . The first study involved 147 women. All those who got flowers smiled. Make a note: all of them. That's the kind of statistical significance scientists love. Among the women who got candles, 23 percent didn't smile. And 10 percent of those who got fruit didn't smile.
. . Another: In an elevator, 122 men and women were given either a flower, a pen, or nothing. Those who got flowers smiled more, talked more, and --here it gets interesting-- stood closer together.
. . Finally, in another test, bouquets were delivered by florists to 113 men and women in a retirement community. All 113 got flowers and a notebook, but some got them earlier and received a second bouquet when the others got theirs. By now you can guess the outcome. The more flowers, the more smiles.
. . From there, it's a bit of a leap to the idea that flowers are prolific because we love them. But the results got the scientists to thinking about how the flower industry of today has evolved into growing things that serve no other purpose than emotional satisfaction. Nature won't even pollinate many of the domesticated flowers. Just among roses, there are so many types conjured by humans that, clearly, flowers aren't what they used to be. But it's likely our collective hand has played a role longer than you might think.
. . Rutgers geneticist Terry McGuire suggests that nature's prettier flowers got to survive and thrive because people didn't destroy them when they cleared land for agriculture. Instead, they cultivated them and have been doing so for more than 5,000 years.
. . "Our hypothesis is that flowers are exploiting an emotional niche. They make us happy", McGuire says. "Because they are a source of pleasure - a positive emotion inducer - we take care of them. In that sense, they're like dogs. They are the pets of the plant world. As humans moved into agricultural settings, these flowers would have been weeds. They might have been tolerated because of their beauty. The seeds would have been preserved --perhaps initially because they were mixed with crop seeds-- and replanted. Humans would have become the seed dispersers. Over time, the best of these flowers might have been selected and the seeds more carefully preserved."
May 25, 05: If you're headed for surgery, take your iPod. A new study by the Yale School of Medicine confirms previous work showing that surgery patients listening to music require much less sedation. Previous studies left open the question of whether it was music that did the trick, or just the act of blocking out the sound of dropped surgical instruments and other operating room noise.
. . In the new study, researchers tested 90 surgery patients at two facilities. Some wore headphones and listened to the music of their choice. Others heard white noise, that hiss and hum common to office buildings that's designed to drown out harsh noises. Others had no headphones. Blocking sounds with white noise did not decrease sedative requirements.
May 25, 05: Cynicism takes hold early in humans. A new study involved 20 children each in kindergarten, second grade and fourth grade. They were told short stories in which the characters made statements that were in their best self-interest in competitive situations.
. . Outright lies were generally recognized by all the children. But when the statement could affect the outcome of a close contest, the second graders, compared to the younger children, exhibited more savvy in recognizing cases in which self-interest might also involve inaccurate claims. "Our research shows that children may be more gullible than adults, but the seeds of doubt are also present from an early age and develop dramatically in the elementary school years."
. . If the seeds of doubt are planted early, they also appear to flower pretty quickly. In a separate test in the same study, the kindergartners were the most likely to think characters were lying, whereas the older children tended to attribute inaccurate statements to pure mistake. "Most elementary school age children are in fact harsher judges of others than adults and older children."
Apr 22, 05: Young girls who enjoy classic romantic fairy tales like "Cinderella" and "Beauty and the Beast" are at greater risk of becoming victims of violent relationships in later life, a British researcher says. A study of both parents of primary school children and women who have been involved in domestic abuse claims than those who grew up reading fairy tales are likely to be more submissive as adults.
. . Susan Darker-Smith, a graduate student who wrote the academic paper, said she found many abuse victims identified with characters in famous children's literature and claimed the stories provide "templates" of dominated women. "They believe if their love is strong enough they can change their partner's behavior."
Apr 13, 05: A new alarm clock monitors sleep patterns and waits for the sleeper to be in the best possible phase before rousing him. The gadget, SleepSmart, exploits the discovery that sleep patterns are repeated approximately every 90 minutes, with a cycle of light sleep, deep sleep and rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, during which we dream most fully. Being roused during the light sleep phase means you are likelier to wake up perky.
. . Using a headband equipped with electrodes and a microprocessor, SleepSmart records the distinct pattern of brainwaves produced during each phase of sleep and transmits the data to a clock unit near the bed.
. . Students at Brown University, Rhode Island, who have formed a company to promote their invention. "They have almost finished a protype and plan to market the product by next year."
Apr 13, 05: A little humor can brighten your outlook, a new study suggests. People who watched a 15-minute comedy video scored higher on a survey of hopefulness compared to those who didn't. The finding suggests humor could be a strategy to relieve stress and maintain well-being.
. . A report released last month from the University of Maryland Medical Center found laughter makes blood vessels function better, causing the tissue that lines the vessels to expand, increasing blood flow. A previous study at the same institution concluded that laughter and an active sense of humor may protect against heart attacks.
. . Laugher can stimulate thought and cause you to toss out automatic behavioral responses in favor of more creative pursuits, Rosen said. That leads to a greater sense of self worth and a tendency to develop plans of attack for dealing with problems.
Apr 4, 05: Children who watch a lot of television are more prone to push other kids around, according to new research. Conversely, four-year-olds whose parents tend to read to them, eat meals with them and go on outings together are significantly less likely to become bullies in grade school. An increase of 3.9 hours of TV per day led to a 25% increase in the probability of becoming a bully.
. . Other studies suggest some 30% of U.S. school children are bullied. One small 1999 study found the number to be as high as 80%. Just last week, a survey reported half of urban sixth-grade students say they were harassed at least once in two-week period.
. . The consequences of bullying have been studied before. Research published in the journal Child Development in 2003 found that young children bullied at school developed signs of antisocial and depressive behavior. A 2001 study in the British Medical Journal found bullying leads to anxiety and depression, especially in young teenage girls.
Ultra-Orthodox Jews more likely to jaywalk: They were three times more likely to walk out onto roads without looking than pedestrians in a secular community.
Feb 8, 05: Bees do it. Birds do it. So do fish and wildebeests. They are all able to gracefully flock or swarm in a particular direction even though not every member of the group knows where they are going. Even human beings will tend to follow each other with a herd mentality --say, out of a crowded theater. New research provides some surprising insight into what's going on, including a group penchant for democratic decisions.
. . Biologists have often wondered if there is some complex communication that goes on between the informed and the uninformed. But Couzin and his collaborators have shown in simulations that a simple set of behavioral rules can control a group. Accuracy increased as more of the members knew where to go. But at a certain point, adding more informed individuals did not increase the accuracy by very much. The minimum percentage of informed individuals needed to achieve a certain level of accuracy depended on the size of the group. If 10 virtual buffaloes need 50% of the herd to know where the watering hole is, a group of 200 can get by with only 5%.
. . In the example of bees, for which scouting out a new nest site is dangerous, as well as time-consuming. Studies have shown that only 5% of a hive’s population gets involved with scouting.
Jan 25, 05: You can try, but you can't ignore that angry voice yelling at you, or anyone else. Whether it's your dad, your girlfriend, your sister or a stranger, you must pay attention. Human brains are just wired that way, according to a study in Nature Neuroscience. Wrathful voices trigger a strong response in the brain, even when we are trying not to pay attention or the comments are meaningless, say researchers. The brain appears to place a high priority on processing urgent sounds, like angry voices, that might indicate a threat is present. So, try as we might, when someone is angry the brain cannot avoid noticing.
. . Using functional MRI technology, the researchers could see what part of the brain was activated by the surly sounds. Even when the subjects were told to ignore an angry voice played to one ear and asked instead to listen to a neutral voice played to the other ear, the MRIs showed increased brain activity in the superior temporal sulcus. Previous studies showed a similar fundamental brain response when subjects saw angry or fearful faces.
. . "A better understanding of how the brain implements emotion and attention is crucial both for our understanding of the interactions between emotion and attention in normal individuals", Grandjean said, "and for the identification of potential cerebral dysfunctions in pathologies with affective disorders such as social anxiety, autism, schizophrenia or depression."
Jan 22, 05: Men and women do think differently, at least where the anatomy of the brain is concerned, according to a new study. The brain is made primarily of two different types of tissue, called gray matter and white matter. This new research reveals that men think more with their gray matter, and women think more with white. Researchers stressed that just because the two sexes think differently, this does not affect intellectual performance.
. . Psychology professor Richard Haier of the University of California, led the research. Their findings show that in general, men have nearly 6.5 times the amount of gray matter related to general intelligence compared with women, whereas women have nearly 10 times the amount of white matter related to intelligence compared to men.
. . "These findings suggest that human evolution has created two different types of brains designed for equally intelligent behavior."
. . This research also gives insight to why different types of head injuries are more disastrous to one sex or the other. For example, in women 84% of gray matter regions and 86% of white matter regions involved in intellectual performance were located in the frontal lobes, whereas the percentages of these regions in a man's frontal lobes are 45% and zero, respectively. This matches up well with clinical data that shows frontal lobe damage in women to be much more destructive than the same type of damage in men.
Dec 23, 04: The common perception that terminally ill people try to hang on until after a major event like their birthday or a big holiday isn't true, according to a new study.
. . Records for more than 300,000 cancer victims who died in the state of Ohio between 1989 and 2000, showed they had no special capability or willingness to keep going until after Christmas, Thanksgiving, or their birthdays, the report said.
The study found woman cancer victims tended to die right *before their birthdays, not after.
Jan 20, 05: We humans can be a depressing bunch. And we sure know how to express our negative feelings. A new study of people in Chicago and Mexico City finds both know more words to describe negative emotions than the positive (50% negative, 30% positive, 20% neutral). Researchers figure that when we're happy, we perceive it as normal and so process our good feelings superficially. "Negative emotions require more detailed thinking, more subtle distinctions", says Robert W. Schrauf, associate professor of applied linguistics at Penn State. "So they require more names."
[undated] According to a group of Canadian scientists, lesbians and gay men are more likely than others to be left-handed. Putting together the results of 20 previous studies that involved more than 23,000 men and women, the scientists concluded that the odds of being left-handed are 39% higher in homosexuals than in heterosexuals.
. . Broken down by gender, they found that gay men were 34% more likely to be left-handed and lesbians were 91% more likely to be left-handed.
. . A separate study, reported at the annual meeting of the Royal College of Psychiatrists in Edinburgh, reported that transsexual men and women are also more likely to be lefties.
. . This is not the first time that scientists noted a connection between being queer and being left-handed. Ten years ago, researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario found that 69% of lesbians and 45% of gay men interviewed were left-handed in "at least one of 12 simple manual tasks."
. . It's estimated that one out of ten people is left-handed; precisely the same percentage of the population that many of us believe is gay, lesbian or bisexual.
. . "They literally think differently, . . . tend to translate everything into visual imagery [and] . . . are more apt to think holistically, skipping over the details. . . . Which explains why so many creative people have been left-handed. . . And why left-handers seem almost to dominate show business."
December 7: Imaginary companions are alive and well among American children. By age seven, 65% of children in a new study had at least one friend that no one else could see. The study involved 152 children aged three and four, and 100 of them were questioned again a few years later. Parents were queried, too. "Having an imaginary companion is normal for school-age children", Stephanie Carlson, a psychologist at the University of Washington, said this week. The companions included invisible boys and girls, a squirrel, a panther, a dog, and a 7-inch-tall elephant. In more than a quarter of the cases, the parents didn't know about the secret friend.
Dec 5, 04: These days, Iranian women are not even allowed to watch men compete on the football field, but 2,000 years ago, they could have been carving the boys to pieces on the battlefield.
. . DNA tests on the 2,000-year-old bones of a sword-wielding Iranian warrior have revealed the broad-framed skeleton belonged to woman. The tomb, which had all the trappings of a warrior's final resting place, was one of 109 and that DNA tests were being carried out on the other skeletons.
. . Hambastegi said other ancient tombs believed to belong to women warriors have been unearthed close to the Caspian Sea.
Nov 15, 04: A fight breaks out, and even though people at the far side of the crowd can't see what's going on, they are immediately on edge. Now, a Harvard researcher has an explanation for this fear contagion --the quick spread of emotion through a crowd.
. . Seeing someone adopt a fearful posture triggers areas of the brain that express emotion and get the body primed for action. It's a response that can race through a crowd like wildfire.
. . "We are extremely sensitive to emotional body language, and we react to it without us being aware of it", said Beatrice M.L. de Gelder of Harvard Medical School. This, she said, "is very good, because that puts us in a position to act."
Oct 14, 04: Most people believe they could easily detect lies, but in fact most miss a good 50%, says deception expert Maureen O'Sullivan of the University of California San Francisco. But O'Sullivan says she has found a special group --just 1% of those she has tested -- who catch a lie nearly 90% of the time.
. . These wizards have a special ability to ferret out little tics that show when a person is lying. She and her colleagues have so far screened 13,000 people for their ability to catch a liar on videotape. "We found 14 people who we called ultimate experts."
. . Another 13 were good at detecting specific types of lies. For example, she said, "There was a group of cops who got very good scores -- they got 80% or more on crime but none of them did well on the video about feeling."
. . Now O'Sullivan is trying to find out how they do it. She finds they have little in common so far, except a motivation to catch liars. Some have advanced degrees, some only a high school education. About 20% had alcoholic parents. [Ahh, yes...]
Sept 17, 04: Preferential parental treatment of particular children has a negative effect on all the children in the home, a new study contends. The researchers suggest this may be because all the children regard their parents' behavior as unfair and unpredictable. That can create resentment in disfavored siblings and uncertainty in favored siblings. It can also undermine sibling relationships, leading to higher levels of anger and aggressiveness.
Sept 17, 04: Deaf children thrown together in a school in Nicaragua without any type of formal instruction invented their own sign language --a sophisticated system that has evolved and grown, researchers reported. Their observations show that children, not adults, are key to the evolution and development of language. "It is the first time anyone has been able to study a language this early. We can really see how a new language emerges." And, it seems, it is children who drive the evolution of language. "It is the child learners who are injecting the learning, the structure, into the language."
Sept 6, 04: Beauty may not be just in the eye of the beholder after all, because a sense of visual attraction is hardwired in the brain at birth, a British scientist said. Psychologist Alan Slater of the University of Exeter in England told a British science conference that babies can recognize their mother from as little as 15 hours after birth and also show a preference for looking at photographs of physically attractive people.
. . Infants show several spontaneous visual preferences. They like watching moving rather than stationary objects, prefer to look at three-dimensional stimuli and find faces fascinating. When given a choice of two facial photographs to look at, babies usually prefer and spend more time gazing at the person who is better-looking. [I must say that there's still the Q of what standard the researchers used to define looks!]
Aug 30, 04: Psychotic mice that flee their littermates may offer insights into diseases such as schizophrenia, U.S. researchers reported. The genetically engineered mice have mutations in two key genes that make them psychotic. The mutations are the same as those found in a Canadian family with a history of schizophrenia, and involve two poorly understood genes.
Those that lacked any working copy of NPAS3 were especially erratic, the researchers report in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
. . The mice with the genetic mutations failed to socialize. One small group of the mutant mice darted around wildly, avoiding their siblings.
. . More than 2 million Americans have schizophrenia, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. The disease, which usually shows up in early adulthood, affects a patient's ability to manage emotions, interact with others and think clearly. Patients may suffer hallucinations, delusions and disordered thinking and have a high risk of suicide. Drugs can manage the symptoms but have unpleasant side effects.
. . McKnight's team said when they examined the brains of the psychotic mice, they found abnormally low levels of a protein called reelin. Reelin is important in the embryonic development of the brain and later in life to brain cell signaling. Other studies of people who died with schizophrenia have found reduced levels of reelin in their brains.
Aug 26, 04: Revenge feels sweet, and Swiss researchers said they have the brain scans to prove it. Investigators said might help explain how social norms arose and regulate behavior, brain centers linked to enjoyment and satisfaction lit up in young men who punished others for cheating them.
. . That instinct probably evolved to grease the wheels of human social interaction, the researchers said. "For thousands of years, human societies did not have the modern institutions of law enforcement -- impartial police and impartial judges that ensure the punishment of norm violations such as cheating in an economic exchange, for example", they wrote. "Thus, social norms had to be enforced by other measures, and private sanctions were one of these means."
Aug 23, 04: U.S. researchers found that women and men with asymmetrical extremities --ears, fingers or feet of different sizes or shapes-- were more likely to react aggressively when annoyed or provoked. This could make sense, the team said. Factors such as smoking or drinking during a pregnancy could stress a fetus in various ways, causing not only slight physical imperfections but also poorer impulse control.
. . "Stressors during pregnancy may lead to asymmetrical body parts. The same stressors will also affect development of the central nervous system, which involves impulse control and aggression. So while asymmetry doesn't cause aggression, they both seem to be correlated to similar factors during pregnancy."
. . [Here's how to design an experiment!] They told 100 college students they were taking part in a study of persuasive ability by asking them to call people to raise money for charity. But their calls went to two experimenters who followed a careful script, either apologetically saying they did not have money to donate, or becoming confrontational and challenging the caller and the charity.
. . The researchers had rigged the phones so they could measure how hard participants slammed the receiver down after the call. The more asymmetrical their ears, fingers and feet, the more force the volunteers tended to use when hanging up, they found. Women were more likely to slam the phone when challenged, while men seemed angrier when politely turned down.
Cognitive barriers that color clear judgment presented a major impediment to Francis Bacon's goal. He identified four: idols of the cave (individual peculiarities), idols of the marketplace (limits of language), idols of the theater (preexisting beliefs) and idols of the tribe (inherited foibles of human thought).
. . In one College Entrance Examination Board survey of 829,000 high school seniors, less than 1% rated themselves below average in "ability to get along with others", and 60% put themselves in the top 10%.
. . And according to a 1997 U.S. News and World Report study on who Americans believe are most likely to go to heaven, 52% said Bill Clinton, 60% thought Princess Diana, 65% chose Michael Jordan and 79% selected Mother Teresa. Fully 87% decided that the person most likely to see paradise was themselves!
Gorillas in our midst.
. . Picture yourself watching a one-minute video of two teams of three players each. One team wears white shirts and the other black shirts, and the members move around one another in a small room tossing two basketballs. Your task is to count the number of passes made by the white team --not easy, given the weaving movement of the players. Unexpectedly, after 35 seconds a gorilla enters the room, walks directly through the farrago of bodies, thumps his chest and, nine seconds later, exits. Would you see the gorilla?
. . Most of us believe we would. In fact, 50% of subjects in this remarkable experiment did not see the gorilla, even when asked if they noticed anything unusual (see their paper "Gorillas in Our Midst" at http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_ lab/). The effect is called inattentional blindness. When attending to one task --say, talking on a cell phone while driving-- many of us become blind to dynamic events, such as a gorilla in the crosswalk.
June 19, 03: The brains of shy people overreact when they see strange new faces, which may explain personality differences and also offer ways to treat anxiety disorders, U.S. researchers said. Even people who have seemingly overcome their innate shyness have an extra-strong reaction in the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain, when shown a new face.
. . About two-thirds of children identified as inhibited as toddlers lost overt signs of those characteristics by adolescence. Of the 13 in the study who were inhibited at age 2, two went on to develop clinical anxiety disorders.
. . Experts say inhibition may be a useful characteristic that evolved long ago to help people react and protect themselves against new threats.
May 4, 03: Violent lyrics in songs increase aggression-related thoughts and emotions and could indirectly create a more hostile social environment, a study by a U.S. psychology association found.
. . The violent songs increased feelings of hostility without provocation or threat. Even the humorous violent songs increased aggressive thoughts. The group said the study contradicts a popular notion that listening to angry, violent music actually serves as a positive catharsis for people.
Mar 10, 03: Children who watch violent television shows, identify with the characters and believe they are realistic are more likely to be aggressive as adults, U.S. researchers reported. But the researchers found the most violent shows did not have the strongest effects, the shows children liked the best did. These included shows that by today's standards would not be considered especially violent. But if parents watch television with their children and discuss the differences with reality, they may be able to temper the effects of TV violence, the team of psychologists said.
. . "Violent scenes that children are most likely to model their behavior after are ones in which they identify with the perpetrator of the violence, the perpetrator is rewarded for the violence and in which children perceive the scene as telling about life like it really is", they wrote. "Thus, a violent act by someone like Dirty Harry that results in a criminal being eliminated and brings glory to Harry is of more concern than a bloodier murder by a despicable criminal who is brought to justice."
Jan 21, 03: Babies are not just passing idle time when they stare goggle-eyed at the television --they are actually learning about the world, U.S. researchers said.
Parents may want to limit what their infants see on television, based on the study, said Donna Mumme, assistant professor of psychology at Tufts University in Boston, who led the research.
. . "Children as young as 12 months are making decisions based on the emotional reactions of adults around them. Ten-month-olds did not seem to be influenced by the videos, Mumme's team reported. But the 1-year-olds were.
. . When the actors acted neutrally or positively to an object, the babies happily played with them. But if the actor had seemed afraid or disgusted, the infant would avoid the object.
Nov 15, 01: In experiments with nearly 100 adults and children,
psychologists at the University of Chicago found that gesturing while explaining a math problem improved the recall of a previously memorized list of numbers or letters.
. . To draw the conclusion, memory test results were compared when subjects were permitted to gesture and when they were told to keep their hands still.
MARCH, 01: . . From "Wild Dreams" By Robert Sapolsky:
"Using advanced imaging equipment, scientists have learned that the prefrontal cortex— the brain's voice of reason —-shuts off during sleep. This suggests Freud was right: thoughts suppressed during the day come oozing out at night."
Nov 1st, 00. "Imagining something and actually seeing it are virtually one and the same to the brain, researchers said.
. . The same parts of the brain light up when a person thinks of a face or a scene as when the same person actually looks at a photograph of the same face or place.
. . A part of the brain's cortex called the parahippocampal place area responded strongly to images of indoor and outdoor spaces, but not at all to faces. Another cortical region, called the fusiform face area, responded strongly to images of faces."
Jon: "As I wrote elsewhere on site, an imagined experience is an experience too, & can effect you almost as much. This helps explain compulsion & paranoia."
Why do some people get all the luck while others never get the breaks they deserve? A psychologist says he has discovered the answer. The results reveal that although
these people have almost no insight into the causes of their luck, their thoughts and behavior are responsible for much of their good and bad fortune.
. . Unlucky people are generally more tense than
lucky people, and this anxiety disrupts their ability to
notice the unexpected. As a result, they miss opportunities
because they are too focused on looking for something else.
. . Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for. They are skilled at creating and noticing
chance opportunities, make lucky decisions by listening to
their intuition, create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.
Lucky people generate good fortune via four principles.
. . Here are Professor Wiseman's four top tips for becoming lucky:
- Listen to your gut instincts - they are normally right.
- Be open to new experiences and breaking your normal routine.
- Spend a few moments each day remembering things that went well.
- Visualize yourself being lucky before an important meeting or telephone call. Luck is very often a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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