Science News
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PSYCHOLOGY.
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July 13, 09: Uttering expletives when you hurt yourself is a sensible policy, according to scientists who have shown swearing can help reduce pain. A study by Keele U researchers found volunteers who cursed at will could endure pain nearly 50% longer than civil-tongued peers.
. . He recruited 64 volunteers to take part and each individual was asked to submerge their hand in a tub of freezing water for as long as possible while repeating a swear word of their choice. They were then asked to repeat the experiment, this time using a more commonplace word that they would use to describe a table.
. . Despite their initial expectations, the researchers found that the volunteers were able to keep their hands plunged in the ice water for a longer period of time when repeating the swear word.
. . While it is not clear how or why this link exists, the team believes that the pain-lessening effect occurs because swearing triggers our natural 'fight-or-flight' response.
July 4, 09: Canadian researchers found those with low self-esteem actually felt worse after repeating positive statements about themselves. They said phrases such as "I am a lovable person" only helped people with high self-esteem.
Jun 30, 09: Nearly 18% of the Italian population --11 million people-- trusts self-styled sorcerers and healers, a consumer watchdog said. The group Telefono Antiplagio found more than 16,000 cases of people being scammed by sorcerers and healers since 1994. There are 155,000 sorcerers and healers active in Italy. Every day, 33,000 people see sorcerers or astrologers in Italy, the study found.
Jun 24, 09: How can a hypnotist paralyze your hand just with words? By making a part of your brain butt in on the process that normally makes your hand move, a study says. So the brain region that's ready to move your hand ignores its usual inputs and listens to this interloper, which says, "Don't even bother", the research concluded.
. . It used brain scans to show what happened when 12 volunteers tried to move a hand that had been paralyzed by hypnosis. Results showed the right motor cortex prepared itself as usual to tell the left hand to move. But the cortex appeared to be ignoring the parts of the brain it normally communicates with in controlling movement. Instead, it acted more in sync than usual with a different brain region called the precuneus. That was a surprise.
. . The precuneus is involved in mental imagery and memory about oneself. Cojan suggests it was brimming with the metaphors the participants had heard from the hypnotist: Your hand is very heavy, it is stuck on the table, etc. So, he said, it might have been telling the motor cortex, "Oh, but your hand is too heavy, you can't move your hand." It's as if the motor cortex "is connected to the idea that it cannot move (the hand) and so ... it doesn't send the message to move."
Jun 24, 09: Experts believe it’s a Herculean effort to control staring, because it’s triggered not by insensitivity but by instinct.
. . People become transfixed due to the work of the amygdala, a primitive part of the brain evolved to sort faces into “safe” or “potentially unsafe” categories. When the amygdala cannot process a face that doesn’t fit any it has previously encountered, it simply freezes like a computer unable to process a command. Scientists say that regaining composure requires serious conscious effort.
. . Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux of New York U, has shown that rats experience a similar kind of involuntary behavior. This suggests the behavior is a primitive one that goes way back into our evolutionary past and is shared by other species.
. . Previous research has shown that when we encounter something that may represent danger, however, the thalamus bypasses the thinking cortex and goes straight to the primitive amygdala to make the call: Is this safe or potentially dangerous? If the visual image fits no known pattern, the amygdala detains the image for further questioning, and, we stare.
. . When this occurs, cortical thinking shuts down, more or less strong-armed by the amygdala trying to fulfill its role as storm trooper against potential danger. Our brain is flooded with electro-chemicals, but those chemicals do not persist, according to Freedman. They will dissipate in three to six seconds. Still, that’s an agonizing chunk of time to remain in visual lockdown.
Jun 23, 09: The brain represents tools as extensions to the body, according to researchers. After the use of a grasping tool, participants asked to grasp an object with their own hands did so more slowly and sluggishly. Blindfolded participants also overestimated the length of their tool-using arm after the exercise. The research seems to confirm a century-old hypothesis that the brain models tools as parts of the body.
May 1, 09: [NO, NO, NO! Lithium is never present in nature --it is extremely reactive. What they mean is Lithium Carbonate.] Drinking water which contains the element lithium may reduce the risk of suicide, a Japanese study suggests. Researchers examined levels of lithium in drinking water and suicide rates in the prefecture of Oita, which has a population of more than one million. The suicide rate was significantly lower in those areas with the highest levels of the element.
High doses of lithium are already used to treat serious mood disorders.
Apr 22, 09: Older adults who were told that older folks do poorly on memory tests indeed did worse than their peers, explained study leader Tom Hess. The reason: Cognitive resources are diverted from memory tasks to worrying about the negative stereotype, the researchers figure. The effect may lead people to avoid memory tasks, allowing the brain to fall fallow and make the whole problem worse.
Apr 16, 09: If you want to know whether your marriage will survive, look at your spouse's yearbook photos. Psychologists have found that how much people smile in old photographs can predict their later success in marriage.
. . In one test, the researchers looked at people's college yearbook photos, and rated their smile intensity from 1 to 10. None of the people who fell within the top 10% of smile strength had divorced, while within the bottom 10% of smilers, almost one in four had had a marriage that ended.
. . In a second trial, the research team asked people over age 65 to provide photos from their childhood (the average age in the pictures was 10 years old). The researchers scored each person's smile, and found that only 11% of the biggest smilers had been divorced, while 31% of the frowners had experienced a broken marriage.
. . Overall, the results indicate that people who frown in photos are five times more likely to get a divorce than people who smile. "Maybe smiling represents a positive disposition towards life. Or maybe smiling people attract other happier people, and the combination may lead to a greater likelihood of a long-lasting marriage."
. . He has considered other explanations, such as the possibility that people who smile more often tend to attract more friends, and a larger support network makes it easier to keep a marriage healthy. Or it could be that people who smile when a photographer tells them to are more likely to have obedient personalities, which could make marriage easier.
Apr 6, 09: Teenage and young adult men who make serious suicide attempts often had emotional problems at age 8, while most suicidal women succumb to depressions that develop after puberty, Finnish researchers said. Nearly four out of five suicidal men tracked in a study in Finland had exhibited problems as 8-year-olds that were evident to their teachers or parents.
. . 877,000 people worldwide kill themselves each year. For every suicide death, anywhere from 10 to 40 attempts are made. Males tended to use "more lethal" methods, while female suicide attempts were mostly by intoxication or poisoning.
. . 78% of the suicidal males had displayed bad conduct at age 8 such as disruptive fits of temper, disobedience, aggression or cruelty toward others, destroying of property, stealing, lying, inattention or hyperactivity.
. . No such pattern was seen for the girls. Sourander's team said previous research has shown "female suicide attempts are often used to communicate distress or to modify the behavior and reactions of others." Most mood disorders affect girls after puberty, they added.
Apr 4, 09: People can guess pretty successfully what breed of dog a person might own just by looking at the owner, a new study finds.
. . A group of 70 people who do not own dogs were asked to match photos of 41 dog owners to three possible breeds --Labrador, poodle or Staffordshire bull terrier. They matched the owners to the dogs more than half the time. Yet given three choices, they should have been right only about a third of the time.
Apr 2, 09: Sisters spread happiness while brothers breed distress, experts believe. Researchers quizzed 571 people aged 17 to 25 about their lives and found those who grew up with sisters were more likely to be happy and balanced.
. . The U of Ulster said having daughters made a family more open and willing to discuss feelings. They said the influence of girls was particularly important after distressing family events such as marital break-ups.
Apr 1, 09: Scientists examined the relationship over one year between three characteristics of insomnia -- difficulty falling asleep, difficulty staying asleep and waking at least two hours earlier than desired --and three suicidal behaviors-- suicidal thoughts, planning and attempts -- of 5,692 Americans.
. . About 35% of those studied reported experiencing at least one type of sleep disturbance in the preceding 12 months.
. . The most consistent link was seen for early morning awakening, which was related to all suicidal behaviors. People with this problem were twice as likely as those with no sleep problems to have had suicidal thoughts in the preceding 12 months, 2.1 times more likely to have planned suicide and 2.7 times more likely to have tried to kill themselves.
Mar 30, 09: The physiological stress on kids that accompanies poverty can adversely affect brain development and hinder working memory in adulthood.
Mar 26, 09: A brain-scanning study of people making financial choices suggests that when given expert advice, the decision-making parts of our brains often shut down. The problem with this, of course, is that the advice may not be good.
. . "When the expert's advice made the least sense, that's where we could see the behavioral effect", said study co-author Greg Berns, an Emory U neuroscientist. "It's as if people weren't using their own internal value mechanisms."
Mar 24, 09: "When a child is born, their brain is not fully-formed, and over the first few years, there's a great proliferation of connections between cells", said physiologist Ian Campbell. "Over adolescence, there is a pruning back of these connections. The brain decides which connections are important to keep, and which can be let go."
. . Scientists call this process synaptic pruning, and speculate that the brain decides which neural links to keep based on how frequently they are used. Connections that are rarely called upon are deemed superfluous and eliminated. Sometimes in adolescence, that pruning process goes awry and important connections are lost, which could lead to psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, the researchers think.
Mar 23, 09: People who have a high family risk of developing depression had less brain matter on the right side of their brains on par with losses seen in Alzheimer's disease, U.S. researchers said.
. . Brain scans showed a 28-percent thinning in the right cortex --the outer layer of the brain-- in people who had a family history of depression compared with people who did not. "The difference was so great that at first we almost didn't believe it. But we checked and re-checked all of our data, and we looked for all possible alternative explanations, and still the difference was there."
. . The thinning on the right side was only linked with a family predisposition to depression. People who actually were depressed also had thinning on the left side of cortex.
He said having a thinner right cortex may increase the risk of depression by disrupting a person's ability to decode and remember social and emotional cues from other people.
. . They did memory and attention tests on the study subjects and found the less brain material a person had in the right cortex, the worse they performed on attention and memory tests.
Peterson said the findings suggest medications used to treat attention problems such as stimulants might be useful in the treatment of depression in some patients.
Feb 23, 09: The brains of men and women respond differently to beautiful objects such as paintings, researchers reported.
. . They used imaging technology called magnetoencephalography to look at the brain activity of 20 volunteers while looking at pretty paintings and ugly pictures of cities and found clear sex differences when the test subjects saw images they described as beautiful.
Women use more of the whole brain when appreciating a nice piece of art, while men use mostly the right side.
. . The differences are likely linked to known differences in the way male and female brains process spatial information, and probably are unique to humans, Ayala and colleagues reported.
"The differences between the decorative objects found in Neandertal and modern human sites support that idea of a 'modern brain' capable of appreciating beauty and its uses in different ways", they wrote.
. . Most explanations of why men and women process this information differently focus on the use of the brain to navigate spatially, they said. "Perhaps women make use of both global and local features in making their judgments, whereas men only rely on global features."
Language could also explain it. "Women obtain higher scores on a diversity of verbal and language tasks. Perhaps women are more likely to associate the images with verbal labels than men."
Feb 23, 09: The brains of men and women respond differently to beautiful objects such as paintings, researchers reported.
. . They used imaging technology called magnetoencephalography to look at the brain activity of 20 volunteers while looking at pretty paintings and ugly pictures of cities and found clear sex differences when the test subjects saw images they described as beautiful.
Women use more of the whole brain when appreciating a nice piece of art, while men use mostly the right side.
. . The differences are likely linked to known differences in the way male and female brains process spatial information, and probably are unique to humans, Ayala and colleagues reported.
"The differences between the decorative objects found in Neandertal and modern human sites support that idea of a 'modern brain' capable of appreciating beauty and its uses in different ways", they wrote.
. . Most explanations of why men and women process this information differently focus on the use of the brain to navigate spatially, they said. "Perhaps women make use of both global and local features in making their judgments, whereas men only rely on global features."
Language could also explain it. "Women obtain higher scores on a diversity of verbal and language tasks. Perhaps women are more likely to associate the images with verbal labels than men."
Feb 16, 09: A widely available blood pressure pill could one day help people erase bad memories, perhaps treating some anxiety disorders and phobias, according to a Dutch study.
Feb 16, 09: Soldiers who perform best under extreme stress have higher levels of chemicals that dampen the fear response, a finding that could lead to new drugs or training strategies to help others cope better.
Feb 12, 09: Babies who use many gestures to communicate when they are 14 months-old have much larger vocabularies when they start school than those who don't, U.S. researchers said.
Feb 11, 09: Researchers used data from a larger analysis of 4,142 adolescents who were not depressed at the start of the study. After seven years of follow-up, more than 7% had symptoms of depression.
. . But while about 6% of those who watched less than three hours a day were depressed, more than 17% of those who watched more than nine hours a day had depressive symptoms.
. . The association was stronger in boys than in girls, and it held after adjusting for age, race, socioeconomic status and educational level.
Feb 4, 09: Your brain's visual centers remain active when your eyes are closed and even when you sleep, studies have shown. But it's a different type of activity, one not fully understood.
. . A new study sheds light. In both situations --resting with eyes closed or the brain, but the activity is represented by slow electrical fluctuations, rather than the bursts of activity that occur when you're awake with eyes wide open. The resting oscillations, as the scientists call them, were found to be most pronounced during deep sleep, as might be expected. The slow fluctuation pattern can be compared to a computer screensaver, say the researchers.
. . Though the newfound activity's function is unclear, the researchers have a couple ideas: Perhaps neurons, like philosophers, must "think" in order to be; neuron survival, the idea goes, would require a constant state of activity. Or maybe the minimal level of activity enables a quick start when an outside stimulus is presented, something like a getaway car with the engine running.
Feb 3, 09: Common antidepressants suspected of raising suicide risk among children reduce the risk for adults, Italian scientists reported.
Jan 30, 09: People who drive Hummers receive almost five times as many traffic tickets as the average driver, according to a new study.
Jan 28, 09: Boys in the US with common names like Michael and David are less likely to commit crimes than those named Ernest or Ivan. Results show that, regardless of race, juveniles with unpopular names are more likely to engage in criminal activity. The least popular names were associated with juvenile delinquency among both blacks and whites.
Jan 26, 09: Babies' brains have the same reaction to musical beats that adult brains do, suggesting that a feel for music is innate. Previously, scientists suspected musical understanding was an offshoot of language.
Jan 26, 09: Are you a social butterfly, or do you prefer being at the edge of a group of friends? Either way, your genes and evolution may play a major role, U.S. researchers reported.
While it may come as no surprise that genes may help explain why some people have many friends and others have few, the researchers said, their findings go just a little farther than that.
"Some of the things we find are frankly bizarre."
Dec 30, 08: people perceive rewards and costs as having only half the weight tomorrow that they have today. In other words, unpleasant chores feel only half as bad when we imagine doing them tomorrow, versus actually doing them today.
. . "Pushing costly, unpleasant tasks into the future is like a getting a 50% discount on them, psychologically", Laibson said. "When you actually arrive at that future date, you'll once again face the same problem."
Dec 10, 08: "Our research shows that simply using phones hands-free is not enough to eliminate significant impacts on a driver’s visual attention", Kunar said, because for all our love of Bluetooth headsets and speaker phones, we humans simply aren't biologically advanced enough to drive and talk simultaneously. "Generating responses for a conversation competes for the brain’s resources with other activities which simply cannot run in parallel. This leads to a cognitive 'bottleneck' developing in the brain."
Dec 9, 08: Teachers using red pen to mark students' work could be harming their psyche as the color is too aggressive, according to education strategies drafted by an Australian state government.
Dec 6, 08: The Josephson Institute's Center for Youth Ethics released a survey saying that today's kids are becoming completely unethical in every way. Fully 40% thought that you cannot succeed in the U.S.A. without lying, cheating, or stealing.
Dec 4, 08: The threat of punishment actually does stamp out freeloaders, tending to transform them into rule-following members of a society, a new study suggests.
Dec 4, 08: All those resuscitation attempts ending in predictable failure are obviously having an effect: heavy watchers of TV medical dramas are scared of hospitals, new research showed.
Dec 3, 08: In his forthcoming book, Born To Be Good (which is not a biography of Obama), Keltner writes that he believes when we experience transcendence, it stimulates our vagus nerve, causing "a feeling of spreading, liquid warmth in the chest and a lump in the throat." For the 66 million Americans who voted for Obama, that experience was shared on Election Day, producing a collective case of an emotion that has only recently gotten research attention. It's called "elevation."
. . Elevation has always existed but has just moved out of the realm of philosophy and religion and been recognized as a distinct emotional state and a subject for psychological study. Psychology has long focused on what goes wrong, but in the past decade there has been an explosion of interest in "positive psychology"—what makes us feel good and why. U of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who coined the term elevation, writes, "Powerful moments of elevation sometimes seem to push a mental 'reset button,' wiping out feelings of cynicism and replacing them with feelings of hope, love, and optimism, and a sense of moral inspiration."
. . We come to elevation, Haidt writes, through observing others—their strength of character, virtue, or "moral beauty." Elevation evokes in us "a desire to become a better person, or to lead a better life."
. . Keltner believes certain people are "vagal superstars" —in the lab, he has measured people who have high vagus nerve activity. "They respond to stress with calmness and resilience, they build networks, break up conflicts, they're more cooperative, they handle bereavement better." He says being around these people makes other people feel good. "I would guarantee Barack Obama is off the charts. Just bring him to my lab."
. . The researchers say elevation is part of a family of self-transcending emotions. Some others are awe, that sense of the vastness of the universe and smallness of self that is often invoked by nature; another is admiration, that goose-bump-making thrill that comes from seeing exceptional skill in action. Keltner says we most powerfully experience these in groups -—no wonder people spontaneously ran into the street on election night, hugging strangers.
. . While there is very little lab work on the elevating emotions, there is quite a bit on its counterpart, disgust. U of Pennsylvania psychologist Paul Rozin has been a leading theorist in the uses of disgust. He says it started as a survival strategy: Early humans needed to figure out when food was spoiled by contact with bacteria or parasites. From there, disgust expanded to the social realm -—people became repelled by the idea of contact with the defiled or by behaviors that seemed to belong to lower people. "Disgust is probably the most powerful emotion that separates your group from other groups", says Keltner.
. . Haidt says disgust is the bottom floor of a vertical continuum of emotion; hit the up button, and you arrive at elevation. This could be why so many Obama supporters complained of being sickened and nauseated by the Republican campaign.
. . Disgust carries with it the notion of contamination, which helps to explain the Republicans' obsession with Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko, and Jeremiah Wright and their frustration that more voters didn't have a visceral reaction that Obama had unforgivably sullied himself by association with these men.
Dec 2, 08: Scientists now have manipulated people's perceptions to make them think they have swapped bodies with another human or even a "humanoid body", experiencing the sensations that the other would feel and giving the illusion of being inside the other's body.
. . Cognitive neuroscientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet succeeded in making subjects perceive the bodies of mannequins and other people as their own. The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. It also worked whether the subject was immobile or was making voluntary movements. However, it was not possible to fool the subjects into identifying with a non-humanoid object, such as a chair
. . A year ago, scientists achieved the illusion of an out-of-body experience in subjects, using virtual reality. The new research manipulates the brain even further - out of itself and into another body.
. . In one of the new body-swap experiments, the head of a shop dummy was fitted with two cameras connected to two small screens placed in front of the subjects' eyes, so that they saw what the dummy "saw." When the dummy's camera eyes and a subject's head were directed downwards, the subject saw the dummy's body where he or she would normally have seen his or her own.
. . The illusion of body-swapping was created when the scientist touched the stomach of both with two sticks. The subject could then see that the mannequin's stomach was being touched while feeling (but not seeing) a similar sensation on his/her own stomach. As a result, the subject developed a powerful sensation that the mannequin's body was his/her own. "This shows how easy it is to change the brain's perception of the physical self."
. . The strength of the illusion was confirmed by the subjects' exhibiting stress reactions when a knife was held to the camera wearer's arm but not when it was held to their own.
. . The object of the projects was to learn more about how the brain constructs an internal image of the body and how we come to feel like we are located inside our bodies, a concept called embodiment.
. . The knowledge that the sense of corporal identification/self-perception can be manipulated to make people believe that they have a new body is of potential practical use in virtual reality applications and robot technology. It could also be useful in research on body image disorders.
Dec 1, 08: A vigorous hand wash or shower could cause a person to be less judgmental. A new study reveals that when a person feels physically clean, he or she cuts others more moral slack.
. . The findings add to past research that has shown a link between physical warmth and generosity as well as physical chill and social isolation. Other past research has shown that sins seem to nudge people to clean themselves, a phenomenon the researchers dubbed the "Macbeth effect" after the dramatized murderess who tried scrubbing her hands to clean off imaginary blood.
. . "If the jury member had washed their hands prior to delivering their verdict, they may judge the crime less harshly." She added, "Similarly, someone may find it easier to overlook a political misdemeanor had they performed an action that made them feel 'clean' prior to casting their vote."
Dec 1, 08: If you're among those who think it's time for change, your attitude may be strongly influenced by how your brain is wired. People who welcome new experiences have stronger connections between their memory and reward brain centers than people who tend to avoid anything new, research now shows.
. . Specifically, people who actively seek lifestyle changes may have a more developed connection between two specific brain areas: the hippocampus, a site for storing and retrieving new and old memories, and the ventral striatum, a reward system which is responsible for those carpe diem moments, said researcher Dr. Bernd. Turns out, if the hippocampus identifies an experience as new, it then relays signals to the striatum to release neurotransmitters which lead to positive feelings.
. . "Brain 'wiring' and personality are not really one causing the other", Weber said. It's more likely to be an interaction between the two.
. . Surveys relating to social acceptance were also conducted on the participants. Here too, the researchers noticed a link. They found that the connection between the brain's frontal lobe and ventral striatum was much stronger when that person had more of a desire to be recognized within their environment. This was expected, since people with defects in their frontal lobes are more likely to violate social norms.
Dec 1, 08: The discovery by archaeologists at the U of Chicago of a stone slab with an inscription confirms that people have been into the idea of a soul for a very long time.
. . The slab, or stele, was recovered from an Iron Age city called Sam'al in Turkey. It dates to around the 8th century B.C. On the 800-pound, three-foot-tall piece of rock was an incised picture of a man, the deceased, who was presumably cremated, and words that explained that the soul of this man now resided within the stone slab.
. . What is it with humans and the idea of a soul? The ancient Greeks, who were around about the same time as the slab was cut, also loved the idea of a soul, and most cultures and religions today buy into it as well. Yet there's no evidence that such a thing really exists. But still, even the most cynical of us is always trying to save our souls, damn other people's souls, and searching for soul mates.
. . It's hard to say exactly when the idea of a second self came into play. Presumably the recognition of a soul appeared hand-in-hand with human consciousness, and it was probably voiced when we had language to put the idea of a soul into words. That would place the time frame for a soul around 200,000 years ago, when humans experienced a cultural explosion which they expressed in art, clothing, and evidence of religion.
. . Clearly, at that point and beyond, humans had moved beyond solving how to find enough food, and they were using their excess brain power and leisure time to think of other things. The idea of a soul, or any kind of human spirituality, might simply be the product of too much brain and too much free time.
. . It might also be an evolutionary strategy that takes us away from the anxieties of self-consciousness. Once fully modern humans knew they could die, it probably made sense to pretend that no one really died but that some part of us lived on into the cosmos.
. . Given the vagaries of ancient life, it probably also made sense to invent souls that had the power to haunt and cause harm to explain all the bad stuff in life. In fact, every culture, even today, has some concept that separates the spirit from the body.
. . Humans seem compelled to think of themselves as something more than the sum of our biological parts, even if that belief makes us do foolish earthly things.
Nov 27, 08: Brain scans of older people in a noisy lab machine give biological backing to the idea that distraction hampers memory with aging, researchers reported.
Nov 24, 08: According to therapists studying game addiction, most who seek treatment aren't technically addicted, just lonely.
Nov 21, 08: Does a messy neighborhood make a difference on how people act? It sure does! Graffiti on the walls, trash in the street, bicycles chained to a fence, all resulted in a decline in how people behaved in a series of experiments.
. . A bit of litter or graffiti didn't lead to predatory crime, but actions ranging from littering to trespassing and minor stealing all increased when people saw evidence of others ignoring the rules of good behavior, Dutch researchers report.
. . Things like littering an area or applying graffiti change the circumstances by indicating that others are not behaving correctly, which weakens the incentive for people to do the right thing. So the researchers were not surprised that people littered more in messy area, for example. But, added Keizer: "We were, however, surprised by the size of the effect."
. . The researchers found a tidy alley in a shopping area where people parked their bicycles. There was a no-littering sign on the wall. The researchers attached flyers for a nonexistent store to the bike handlebars and observed behavior.
. . Under normal circumstances, 33% of riders littered the alley with the flyer. But after researchers defaced the alley wall with graffiti, the share of riders who littered with the flyers jumped to 69%. They did a half-dozen similar experiments, all with similar results. The work is related to the "Broken Window Theory", which suggests that urban disorder such as broken windows and graffiti encourage petty crime.
Nov 21, 08: Parents who choose a buggy that seats their baby facing away from them could risk long-term development problems in their children, according to a study.
Nov 20, 08: A 2002 National Geographic study indicated that nearly a third of young Americans could not locate the Pacific Ocean.
Nov 16, 08: Unhappy people glue themselves to the TV 30% more than happy people. The finding comes from a survey of nearly 30,000 American adults conducted between 1975 and 2006 as part of the General Social Survey.
. . While happy people reported watching an average of 19 hours of television per week, unhappy people reported 25 hours a week. The results held even after taking into account education, income, age and marital status. In addition, happy individuals were more socially active, attended more religious services, voted more and read a newspaper more often than their less-chipper counterparts.
. . The researchers are not sure, though, whether unhappiness leads to more TV-watching or more viewing leads to unhappiness.
Nov 7, 08: Brain scans of teens with a history of aggressive bullying behavior suggest that they may actually get pleasure out of seeing someone else in pain, U.S. researchers said. "The reason we were surprised is the prevailing view is these kids are cold and unemotional in their aggression", said Lahey.
. . They showed both groups video clips of someone inflicting pain on another person and tracked brain activity with a type of imaging called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. In the aggressive teens, areas of the brain linked with feeling rewarded --the amygdala and ventral striatum-- became very active when they observed pain being inflicted on others. But they showed little activity in an area of the brain involved in self-regulation --the medial prefrontal cortex and the temporoparietal junction-- as was seen in the control group.
Oct 28, 08: It often seems a thin line between love and hate, and now scientists think they know why. Brain scans of people shown images of individuals they hated revealed a pattern of brain activity that partly occurs in areas also activated by romantic love, Semir Zeki and John Paul Romaya of University College London reported.
. . The brain scans identified a pattern of activity in different areas of the brain the researchers called a "hate circuit" that switched on when people saw faces they despised. One part of the brain that switched on was an area considered critical in predicting other people's actions, something that is likely key when confronting a hated person, the researchers said.
. . The brain activity also occurred in the putamen and insula, two areas activated when people viewed the face of a loved person. Scientists have linked the regions to aggressive action and distressing situation.
. . But there were important differences as well. A bigger part of the cerebral cortex --an area linked to judgment and reasoning-- de-activates with love compared to hate. While both emotions are all-consuming passions, it may be that people in love are often less critical and judgmental about their partner but need to maintain their focus when dealing with a hated rival.
Oct 28, 08: From screaming baseball fans to political rally-goers, groups that engage in boastful self-aggrandizing may be trying to mask insecurity and low social status. "Our results suggest that hubristic, pompous displays of group pride might actually be a sign of group insecurity as opposed to a sign of strength", said researcher Cynthia Pickett, associate professor of psychology.
. . While authentic pride is linked with real confidence in your group, hubristic pride is a false arrogance that belies insecurities about one's group.
. . Each participant then rated to what extent they would use certain words to describe themselves at the time of the event or achievement. Some of the descriptors indicated hubristic pride, such as "snobbish", "pompous" and "smug", while others were linked with authentic pride, such as "accomplished", "successful" and "confident."
. . The results showed that groups in which individuals boasted and gloated --a sign of hubristic pride-- tended to have low social status or they were vulnerable to threats from other groups. So the worse the person felt about their group's status as well as how badly they thought the public viewed the group, the more likely that member would experience that empty, boastful pride. Hubristic pride can rear its ugly head in both small groups like sports teams and larger groups like citizens of a country.
. . In contrast, those groups that expressed pride by humbly focusing on members' efforts and hard work tended to have high social standing in both the public and personal eyes.
. . She added, "You can think of it as the distinction between nationalism and patriotism, with nationalism being the sense of it's not just that I love my country, it's that my country is best."
. . When group members show signs of hubristic pride, such as making grandiose statements about their country, that could be a sign of underlying insecurity, the researchers said.
Oct 26, 08: The Internet is not just changing the way people live but altering the way our brains work with a neuroscientist arguing this is an evolutionary change which will put the tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.
. . Gary Small, a neuroscientist at UCLA in California who specializes in brain function, has found through studies that Internet searching and text messaging has made brains more adept at filtering information and making snap decisions.
. . But while technology can accelerate learning and boost creativity it can have drawbacks as it can create Internet addicts whose only friends are virtual and has sparked a dramatic rise in Attention Deficit Disorder diagnoses.
. . Small, however, argues that the people who will come out on top in the next generation will be those with a mixture of technological and social skills.
Oct 25, 08: By hypnotizing people, psychologists were able to induce synesthesia, where senses get crossed, and cause them to see numbers as colors.
Oct 25, 08: People are more likely to judge strangers as welcoming and trustworthy when they are holding a hot cup of coffee, research shows.
Oct 15, 08: Scientists have pinpointed a key brain chemical involved in dealing with the sudden loss or long-term separation of a partner. The finding in a type of rodent called a prairie vole could lead to potential treatments for people suffering severe depression-like symptoms after losing a partner. The team studied prairie voles because, unlike 95% of all mammals, the furry creatures form long-lasting bonds with their mates.
. . Tests demonstrated that a brain chemical known as "corticotropin releasing factor", a neurotransmitter involved in the stress response, was elevated in all the voles which had bonded with a partner. Voles given a compound which blocks the chemical from signaling in the brain showed no evidence of these symptoms, suggesting that drugs could do the same in people struggling to overcome the loss of somebody close.
Oct 15, 08: In a study of Christian church members who approached their church for help with a personal or family member's diagnosed mental illness, researchers found that more than 32% were told by their pastor that they or their loved one did not really have a mental illness. The problem was solely spiritual in nature, they were told.
. . Here's the thing: Other studies have found that clergy, and not psychologists or other mental health experts, are the most common source of help sought in times of psychological distress. "The results are troubling because it suggests individuals in the local church are either denying or dismissing a somewhat high percentage of mental health diagnosis. Those whose mental illness is dismissed by clergy are not only being told they don't have a mental illness, they are also being told they need to stop taking their medication. That can be a very dangerous thing."
. . Baylor researchers also found that women were more likely than men to have their mental disorders dismissed by the church. In a subsequent survey, Baylor researchers found the dismissal or denial of the existence of mental illness happened more in conservative churches, rather than more liberal ones.
. . All of the participants in both studies were previously diagnosed by a licensed mental health provider as having a serious mental illness, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, prior to approaching their local church for assistance.
Oct 15, 08: Certain types of depression may be advantageous. The lethargy and disrupted mental state can help us disengage from unattainable goals —-whether it is an unrequited love or an exalted social position. Evolution likely favored individuals who pause and reassess ambitions, instead of wasting energy being blindly optimistic.
. . Natural selection also likely held the door open for disorders such as attention deficit. Quickly abandoning a low stimulus situation was more helpful for male hunters than female gatherers, which may explain why boys are five times more likely than girls to be hyperactive.
. . Similarly, in its mildest form, bipolar disorder can increase productivity and creativity. Bipolar individuals (and their relatives) also often have more sex than average people.
Oct 4, 08: The mind naturally creates illusions and superstitions at times of stress --and this could be adding to the global financial crisis, say scientists. US researchers say feeling "out of control" makes us more likely to misinterpret information as we search for signs of order. Researchers believe that other kinds of illusion, from conspiracy theories to superstitions, stem from the same basic subconscious problem.
Oct 2, 08: Mothers with high expectations produce super-confident daughters, research suggests. A study of more than 3,000 children born in 1970 found girls whose mothers had high hopes for their future felt more in control of their lives at 30. Girls whose mothers predicted at age 10 that they would go on to further education had greater self-esteem as adults --there was no link for boys.
. . It is thought mothers may push their daughters to achieve in higher education more than their sons, even if they have similar expectations for them. "It would be fascinating to see what effect fathers' expectations have on daughters --I have a sense that fathers' expectations could have an effect on both genders."
Oct 1, 08: Low levels of the stress hormone cortisol have been linked to antisocial behavior in adolescent boys.
. . Cortisol levels in the body usually surge in stressful situations, thought to help people regulate emotions. But a Cambridge U study found this did not happen in boys with a history of severe antisocial behavior. The Biological Pyschiatry study suggests some bad behavior may be a form of mental illness linked to a chemical imbalance in the brain.
. . An increase in cortisol levels is thought to make people behave more cautiously, and help them to regulate their emotions, particularly their temper and violent impulses. "A possible treatment for this disorder offers the chance to improve the lives of both the adolescents who are afflicted and the communities in which they live."
. . An estimated 3% to 5% of children in the developed world exhibit antisocial behavior --such as vandalism, mugging and starting fights-- that can get them expelled from school, in trouble with the police or even sent to jail.
Sept 25, 08: Men might strut their stuff on Wall Street and on Capitol Hill, but across America, women wield the power on the home front. A survey by the Pew Research Center finds that among 43% of couples, the woman makes more of the decisions in the domestic realm than men do. By contrast, men make more of the decisions in only about a quarter of all couples. And about three-in-ten couples split decision-making responsibilities equally.
Sept 25, 08: The possibility of "losing" in front of other people drives people to pay too much in auctions, US research suggests.
Sept 25, 08: Your office or bedroom holds telltale signs of whether you are a conservative or a liberal, finds a new study. While political conservatives tend to keep a tidy, organized office, political liberals favor colorful, more stylish but cluttered spaces. Conservatives and liberals leave behind distinct "behavioral residue" that can be picked up by savvy scientists and possibly other observers.
. . Liberals' offices were judged as significantly more distinctive, comfortable, stylish, modern, and colorful and as less conventional and ordinary, in comparison with conservatives' offices.
. . Conservatives showed higher scores for conscientiousness, which measures a person's need for order, discipline, achievement striving and rule following.
. . Jost found that liberals tended to score higher than conservatives on one key measure called openness to experiences, which includes holding wide interests, and being imaginative and insightful.
Sept 22, 08: Pleasant scents give rise to pleasant dreams, and foul smells turn fantasy to phantasmagoria: so concludes a small, unreplicated and wholly plausible study on odor and dreaming. They have shown, respectively, that women are not awakened by the smell of rotten eggs, and that snores do not correlate with nightmares.
Sept 18, 08: Americans figure that we choose our own political beliefs, but actually it could come down to biology. Individuals who are more easily startled by threats are more likely than others to support protective policies. A physiological study shows that conservatives startle more easily than liberals. The finding suggests fear-mongering could be a winning tactic for conservatives.
. . The study involved 46 Nebraska residents, chosen for having strong political beliefs from a larger population of randomly selected individuals. The participants answered survey questions on political beliefs, personality traits and demographics.
. . A couple of months later, the same participants underwent tests for their so-called startle reflexes. The researchers measured levels of skin moisture as indicators of stress and anxiety for each participant as he or she looked at threatening images, including a large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it. Similarly, participants also viewed three non-threatening images (a bunny, a bowl of fruit and a happy child) placed within a series of other images.
. . The researchers also measured the intensity of the participants' eye blinks in response to sudden, jarring noises. Harder blinks are linked with a heightened state of fear, the researchers say.
. . Participants who scored high on the skin and blinking stress tests also tended to support military spending, warrantless searches, death penalty, the Patriot Act, obedience, patriotism, the Iraq War, school prayer and the concept of Biblical truth. And they tended to oppose pacifism, immigration, gun control, foreign aid, compromise, premarital sex, gay marriage, abortion rights and pornography.
. . Those who were less startled by threatening images and noises were more likely to favor foreign aid, liberal immigration policies, pacifism and gun control.
Sept 12, 08: It sounds paradoxical, but the frequency of crashes between bikes and cars decreases as the number of bikes on the road rises.
Sept 13, 08: Taller people are happier on average than shorter people, with each extra inch in height giving as much satisfaction as a 4% increase in income, according to a U.S. study.
. . Data from a Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index study found taller people were more satisfied with their lives, more likely to report positive emotions like enjoyment and happiness, and less likely to report emotions like anger, sadness, and stress. "On average, men who gave their lives the worst possible rating were more than three-quarters of an inch shorter than the average man."
. . Men who did not graduate from high school are on average more than an inch shorter than average-height men are and are up to two inches shorter than the average college-educated man. The differences were found to be slightly less for women.
. . "The main reason why taller people do better is because they have higher incomes, they are better educated, and they work in higher status occupations." Money, in turn, is a powerful predictor of life satisfaction.
Sept 11, 08: A new touch-sensitive nerve fiber responsible for the sense of pleasure experienced during stroking has been described at a UK conference.
. . The nerves tap into a human's reward pathways, and could help explain why we enjoy grooming and a good hug, a neuroscientist has explained. His team used a stroking machine to reveal the optimal speed and pressure for the most enjoyable caress. He thinks that the stroking movements are activating C-fibers, which are wired into the rewards systems in the brain, causing the release of feel-good hormones.
. . Professor McGlone points out that these touch nerves are not responsible for the pleasure experienced from rubbing sexual organs, nor are they found in a person's palms or soles (too distracting).
. . Stroking speeds of about 5cm per second, while applying 2g of pressure per square cm, is optimal, and gave the volunteers most pleasure.
Sept 9, 08: Could the right drug make you a better person? A British psychiatrist raises and argues for that possibility in a new paper. In fact, he says that in many clinical settings, moral steroids are already being used. "Within many clinical encounters, there may already be a subtle form of moral assistance going on, albeit one we do not choose to describe in these terms", writes Sean Spence of the U of Sheffield."
. . Performance-enhancing drugs are generally used to enhance performance in competitive settings, like sports. On Wired Science, we've spent a lot of time looking at ways to increase cognitive performance. But what Spence suggests is that science should be searching for drugs to make people more "humane" not just smarter.
. . Spence describes the case of a man with "antisocial personality disorder" --somewhere on the continuum between dangerously sociopathic and just kind of a jerk-- who requests drugs to prevent himself from harming a girlfriend. In making that request, Spence says that the man is using pharmaceuticals to exhibit "moral agency". "Hence, if we ask the question 'Can pharmacology help to enhance human morality?' then we should answer 'yes,' that sometimes it can be used as a means to this end", Spence writes.
. . What do you think? Do you already use some substance --say, marijuana or a prescription painkiller-- not for how it makes you feel, but how it influences your behavior toward other people? Do you consider this "moral pharmacology"? Spence mentions that drugs could be specifically designed to "target and increase a prosocial feeling and behavior such as 'kindness.'" Would you take a kindness pill?
Sept 2, 08: The seemingly nonsensical Zen practice of "thinking about not thinking" could help free the mind of distractions, new brain scans reveal. This suggests Zen meditation could help treat attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (so-called ADD or ADHD), obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder, major depression and other disorders marked by distracting thoughts.
. . Zen meditation vigorously discourages mental withdrawal from the world and dreaminess, and instead asks one to keep fully aware with a vigilant attitude. It typically asks one to silently focus on breathing and one's posture with eyes open in a quiet place and to calmly dismiss any thoughts as they pop up, essentially "thinking nothing". One can over time learn how to keep one's mind from wandering, become aware of otherwise unconscious behaviors and preconceived notions and hopefully gain insights into oneself, others and the world.
Aug 28, 08: Brain activity increased in babies' temporal and left frontal areas whenever the repetitious words were played. Words with non-adjacent repetitions ("bamuba" or "napena") elicited no distinctive responses from the brain. This suggests "mommy" and "daddy" are well-chosen words to teach a baby, and it also indicates that the ability to more easily recognize these sorts of repetitive sounds is hard-wired in the human brain.
Aug 28, 08: Humans are selfish in earliest childhood but by the age of seven or eight are keen to share equally, a developmental change so sudden that it can only be explained, at least in part, by genes, according to a study. Behavioral scientists and sociologists have quarrelled for decades as to whether generosity and selfishness are inherited or result from social conditioning.
. . But new experiments with 229 Swiss children between the ages of three and eight suggest that Homo sapiens is probably somewhere in between: humans look out for No. 1, but also express, if not outright generosity, at least an aversion to inequality.
. . The study could help explain how humans developed the ability to cooperate in large groups of individuals who are unrelated. At least one result was unexpected, said Fehr: children with no siblings were more, rather than less, generous.
July 30, 08: The world's oldest recorded joke has been traced back to 1900 BC and suggests toilet humor was as popular with the ancients as it is today. It is a saying of the Sumerians, who lived in what is now southern Iraq and goes: "Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband's lap." It heads the world's oldest top 10 joke list published by the U of Wolverhampton.
July 18, 08: When a baby breast-feeds, it triggers a flood of the hormone oxytocin that releases milk from the mammary gland and a feeling of love and trust in the mother that ensures the baby's needs are met.
July 17, 08: Scientists have located an area in the brain that fails to "kick-in" for people with obsessive compulsive disorder and those at risk of developing the condition.
July 14, 08: A baby's smile does more than warm a mother's heart --it also lights up the reward centers of her brain, according to the results of a brain imaging study. The finding, investigators say, could go a long way in helping researchers dissect the unique bond between mother and infant and how it sometimes goes wrong.
. . The investigators found that when the mothers saw their own infants' faces, key areas of the brain associated with reward lit up during the scans, suggesting increased blood flow to that area. The areas stimulated by the sight of their own babies were those involved in thinking, movement, behavior and emotion. "These are areas that have been activated in other experiments associated with drug addiction", said Strathearn. The strength of mom's reaction depended on her baby's facial expression. "The strongest activation was with smiling faces."
July 14, 08: Like adults, babies can remember more things by grouping objects together, a new study found. The finding shows short term memory in babies works similarly to that in adults, who routinely break information into chunks to remember more of it. The discovery indicates that this memory-boosting trick does not seem to be learned.
July 11, 08: When children see others in pain, their brains respond as if it were happening to them, U.S. researchers said.
Holt: "A guy in Greek-mythology called Palamedes invented practically everything —-numbers, currency, lighthouses, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. He also supposedly invented the joke. And, of course, he was stoned to death.
. . There's the superiority theory, that jokes express scorn for your inferiors — cripples and cuckolds and foreigners and the like. Plato said we laugh at vice. Then there's the Freudian interpretation, that it's all about sexual repression. Finally, there's the seduction theory, based on the observation that men do most of the joking while women do most of the laughing. Christopher Hitchens wrote a piece in Vanity Fair arguing that the only way most guys can impress women is to make them laugh.
. . V. S. Ramachandran, the brain researcher, has a theory about the origin of laughter —-that when you're in the jungle and there's an apparent threat, the first member of the kinship group to notice that it's not a real threat emits a stereotyped vocalization. And it's contagious, so everyone starts laughing. That's also the basis of the relief theory of humor, that there's a release of the energy you had summoned up to solve some puzzle. Kant said that the essence of humor is a strained expectation dissolving into nothing."
Jun 30, 08: Denmark, with its democracy, social equality and peaceful atmosphere, is the happiest country in the world, researchers said.
Jun 30, 08: Psilocybin is found in so-called "magic mushrooms." It's illegal, but it has been used in religious ceremonies for centuries. The study involved 36 men and women during an eight-hour lab visit. It's one of the few such studies of a hallucinogen in the past 40 years.
. . "I feel more centered in who I am and what I'm doing", said Osborn, now 66, of Providence, R.I. "I don't seem to have those self-doubts like I used to have. I feel much more grounded (and feel that) we are all connected."
. . Scientists reported that when they surveyed volunteers 14 months after they took the drug, most said they were still feeling and behaving better because of the experience.
. . With further research, psilocybin (pronounced SILL-oh-SY-bin) may prove useful in helping to treat alcoholism and drug dependence, and in aiding seriously ill patients as they deal with psychological distress, said study lead author Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins.
Jun 25, 08: Scientists have identified a primitive area of the brain that makes us adventurous -- a finding which may help explain why people routinely fall for "new" products when shopping.
. . Using brain scans to measure blood flow, British researchers discovered that a brain region known as the ventral striatum was more active when subjects chose unusual objects in controlled tests. The ventral striatum is involved in processing rewards in the brain through the release of neurotransmitters like dopamine.
. . Scientists believe the existence of this age-old reward mechanism indicates there is an evolutionary advantage in sampling the unknown. "In humans, increased novelty-seeking may play a role in gambling and drug addiction, both of which are mediated by malfunctions in dopamine release."
Jun 24, 08: Our social nature means that we interact with each other in positive, friendly ways, and it also means we know how to manipulate others in a very negative way.
. . Neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin at the U of California, San Francisco, has also recently discovered that sarcasm, which is both positively funny and negatively nasty, plays an important part in human social interaction.
. . The corporate chairman throws out a sarcastic remark and those who "get" it laugh, smile, and gain favor. In the same way, if the chair never makes a remark, sarcastic people are making them behind his or her back, forming a clique by their mutually negative, but funny, comments. Either way, sarcasm plays a role in making and breaking alliances and friendship.
Jun 18, 08: Researchers are increasingly questioning the way that the police, lawyers and the courts think about memory. They argue that this conventional model of memory –-like a detailed photograph or video film – is fundamentally flawed.
. . One of the most prominent of these researchers, Prof Elizabeth Loftus of the U of California at Irvine, even says that courts should have a new oath for witnesses: "Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, or whatever it is you think you remember?"
. . They conducted a survey asking if people remembered seeing the TV film of the plane hitting the building. More than half of the respondents said they had. A later study found that the proportion had gone up to two-thirds. The problem is, there is no TV film of the accident. Asking the question had itself apparently changed people's memories.
Jun 16, 08: A nice hug and some sympathy can help a bit after we get pushed around. Turns out, chimpanzees use hugs and kisses the same way. And it works. Researchers studying people's closest genetic relatives found that stress was reduced in chimps that were victims of aggression if a third chimp stepped in to offer consolation.
. . While chimps show this empathy, monkeys do not, he added. There is also suggestive evidence of such behavior in large-brained birds and dogs, said Fraser, but it has not yet been shown that it reduces stress levels in those animals.
Jun 16, 08: Everyone knows the face of fear. The damsel in distress usually widens her eyes and flares her nostrils in horror. It turns out this expression isn't merely for cinematic effect, but actually serves a biological function, scientists have found, by altering the way our senses perceive the world.
. . They took images of people's faces as they posed with expressions associated with fear and disgust. Using statistical models, the team analyzed the faces and found that the two expressions produced opposite facial effects.
. . The scientists then tested what function these facial changes served. They took various measures of sensory perception, such as volume of air intake, width of the visual field and peripheral vision, and speed of visual tracking. Across the board, the researchers found that when making fearful expressions, subjects breathed in more air, saw a wider field of view, and could visually track targets more quickly. "Those changes were very consistent with the idea that fear is expanding the sensory surfaces. Disgust seems to produce the opposite effect, contracting the sensory intake."
. . Darwin and others hypothesized that expressions such as happiness (smiling) and sadness (frowning) may serve a social function, by communicating the internal emotion a person is feeling.
Jun 13, 08: 1 The pitches in musical scales are likely derived from language. Turns out, aspects of spoken English and Mandarin correlate to the intervals between notes in a chromatic scale (the black and white piano keys in an octave). Is it music we love or the sound of our own voices?
. . 2 When musicians improvise, the lateral prefrontal areas of their brains —-responsible for planning and self-censorship-— basically turn off. Meanwhile, the medial prefrontal cortex —-linked to self-expression and activities like telling a story about yourself-— lights up.
. . 3 Getting "Eye of the Tiger" stuck in your head is the result of a glitch in your auditory cortex. This part of your brain processes sounds and stores them for later recall. It powers up and can start crooning uncontrollably after hearing just a few notes of a familiar tune. Want it to stop? Listen to the whole song or do some math.
Jun 11, 08: Living near green space makes little or no difference in how much people exercise during their leisure time, Dutch researchers said.
May 18, 08: The dire situations in cyclone-battered Myanmar and quake-tossed southwestern China and the impulse of many to offer relief have a lot to do with human nature. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors likely did it, and non-human primates do it.
. . We are hard-wired to help others, to drop everything in crisis situations, scientists say. "People do really respond in these crisis situations where it's really a short-term matter of life or death", said Daniel Kruger at the U of Michigan's School of Public Health. The motivation to give dates back to our hunter-gatherer ancestors, he said. Some non-human primates also have been shown to step in during a crisis to help their kin or even humans. But we don't help everybody in need and some people even look the other way. The Myanmar government is an infamous example.
. . In the end, looking out for "number one", could be the underlying reason we choose to help, or choose not to help others, one scientist says. "I think the help is triggered by seeing victims, imagining oneself in the situation, so basic identification and empathy", said Frans de Waal, a psychologist at Emory U and the Yerkes Primate Center. "I doubt that we would be willing to help if we didn't have images, didn't have anything to hang our human response system to, which is geared towards emotionally loaded images."
. . Research has shown that helping others, either through donating money or time, makes a person feel good. David Schroeder, a professor of psychology at the U of Arkansas. "In order to deal with that negative feeling they're experiencing, one way to alleviate that is to help that person out of that plight." Though the decision to help tends to be rooted in our evolutionary history and driven by emotions, a weighing of costs and benefits takes place, though not consciously.
. . To make any difference in Darfur, he said, a person would have to make a much longer-term commitment that could be quite taxing, physically and monetarily. Whether those in need are close relatives or friends also plays into that calculation, Kruger said. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, who foraged in groups of 150 individuals, their "in group" included individuals they didn't have close relations with.
. . Though the junta are barring foreign entrance to Myanmar at the expense of humans, they are not operating under a different set of "human nature" rules, some experts say.
May 14, 08: According to this report and this new book, conservatives are generally happier than liberals, "because liberals lack ideological rationalizations that would help them frame inequality in a positive (or at least neutral) light."
May 14, 08: "Suicide tourists" —out-of-towners who make up 10.8% of Manhattan suicides.
May 12, 08: Adults with higher levels of hostility are more likely to be lighter at birth and throughout childhood than less hostile people according to a study. Hostility has been linked to risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality, but it is uncertain why this occurs. They suggest that a common underlying origin may be low fetal and early postnatal development.
. . Subjects completed a test called the Cook-Medley Hostility Scale at an average age of 63.4 years. The authors then estimated the subjects' growth patterns from birth, child welfare, and school records. Adult body size was also measured in a physical examination.
. . Study participants with higher levels of hostility had a lower body weight and smaller body mass index at birth --they also had a slower than average weight gain from birth to 6 months of age and throughout childhood. These subjects, however, became heavier in adulthood. Individuals with higher levels of hostility also tended to be shorter in the first year of life and were also shorter in adulthood.
. . "These two trajectories of growth that characterized men and women with higher levels of hostility are to a large extent comparable to the trajectories that our study group has shown to depict men and women who have coronary events, stroke, or type 2 diabetes as adults."
. . The effects appeared to be unrelated to sex, father's occupational status, mother's age at delivery, number of siblings, breastfeeding or education level attained by adulthood.
May 12, 08: Sleepwalkers should keep a regular bedtime to avoid unwanted evening strolls, said Antonio Zadra U de Montreal, who led a team that recently investigated the link between sleep loss and sleepwalking. Somnambulism, which affects up to 4% of adults, can cause mental confusion, bouts of amnesia and even physical injuries in those affected as they wander.
. . Sleepwalking is "a disorder of arousal, a kind of mixed state of being", Kapur said. There are three states of being in the world of sleep researchers --wakefulness, non-REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and REM sleep (most associated with dreams). Sleepwalking is a mixture of wakefulness and non-REM sleep, he said.
. . Some sort of arousal or disruption to sleep can also trigger sleepwalking, Kapur said. So people with sleep apnea (an interruption of breathing --snoring is commonly caused by apnea) sometimes sleepwalk, because apnea can create a state where someone is in between non-REM sleep and wakefulness.
May 8, 08: Among his investigated traits is something he calls "uncertainty avoidance." This is an index of a society's tolerance for uncertainty and ambiguity, and its willingness to search for new truths.
. . When it comes to uncertainty avoidance, Americans score 15% lower than the Dutch. In other words, they truly seem to be more disposed to take on ambiguous projects. Actually, the Dutch are closer to the Americans in this regard then many of their European neighbors. The Greeks, French, Belgians, Italians, and Germans are even more inclined to avoid uncertainty then residents of The Netherlands. (Only the British do substantially better: In fact, their score is lower than the Americans'.) Both India and China score lower than the U.S. on Hofstede's index.
May 6, 08: Suicide victims who were abused as children have clear genetic changes in their brains, Canadian researchers reported in a finding they said shows neglect can cause biological effects.
. . The findings offer potential ways to find people at high risk of suicide, and perhaps to treat them and prevent future suicides. And, the researchers said, they also offer insights into how neglect and abuse can perpetuate unhealthy behavior through the generations.
. . They found changes in the genetic material of all 18 suicide victims. The changes were not in the genes themselves, but in the ribosomal RNA, which is the genetic material that makes proteins that in turn make cells function. These changes involved a chemical process called methylation, a so-called epigenetic change involving the processes of turning genes on and off.
. . "The big remaining questions are whether scientists could detect similar changes in blood DNA --which could lead to diagnostic tests-- and whether we could design interventions to erase these differences in epigenetic markings", Szyf said. "Ultimately we believe that a person who gets better from psychotherapy is inducing changes in the brain", Nestler told reporters at a meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.
. . "You can put two rats on a table and tell which one is raised by a low-licking mother. The one reared by a low-licking mother is more nervous, and fatter", Meaney said. Images of the brain cells of the rats show the brain cells of low-licking mothers have fewer dendrites. These are the strands that help one neuron communicate with another.
. . He said female rats reared by low-licking mothers reached puberty earlier, meaning they had more offspring. Similar findings are true of humans, who often have children at younger ages when times are stressful. The best way to pass along genes in uncertain times is to have more children, he said.
May 6, 08: More evidence is being put forward that breastfed babies eventually become more intelligent than those who are fed with formula milk. Canada's McGill U found breastfed babies ended up performing better in IQ tests by the age of six.
. . But the researchers were unsure whether it was related to the breast milk itself or the bond from breastfeeding. One problem has been that some of the research has struggled to identify whether the findings were related to the fact that mothers from more affluent backgrounds were more likely to breastfeed and it was factors related to the family circumstances that was really influencing intelligence.
. . But the latest study attempted to take this into account by following the progress of children born in hospitals in Belarus, some of which ran breastfeeding promotion schemes to boost rates across all groups.
. . They found that those who breastfed exclusively for the first three months --with many also continuing to 12 months-- scored an average of 5.9 points higher on IQ tests in childhood.
. . Fatty acids found in breast milk are thought to boost intelligence, but the report said the physical and emotional aspect of breastfeeding may lead to permanent changes to brain development. The researchers also suggested breastfeeding may increase verbal interaction between mother and child, which in turn could aid their development.
May 2, 08: Scientists have unraveled how a horse tranquilizer and hallucinogenic night club drug known as "Special K" can ease depression, researchers said.
Apr 28, 08: Liars might think they are good at covering up their deceit but a new Canadian study shows there's one thing they can't control that will give them away --flashes of emotion in their faces.
. . Researchers at Dalhousie U's Forensic Psychology Lab in Halifax conducted the first detailed study on the secrets revealed when people put on a false face or inhibit various emotions, and found their faces told the truth. But instead of clues like shifty eyes or sweaty brows, their expression would crack briefly, allowing displays of true emotions such as happiness, sadness, disgust and fear to come through.
Apr 23, 08: Paying people a compliment appears to activate the same reward center in the brain as paying them cash, Japanese researchers said.
Apr 23, 08: We sure do learn from our mistakes, but what we learn is how to make more mistakes, new research shows. This seemingly counterintuitive idea comes from a study of a phenomenon called tip of the tongue (TOT).
. . A tip-of-the-tongue state occurs when your brain has accessed the correct word, but for some reason can''t retrieve the sound information for it. While the word-glitch can happen regardless of your vocabulary aptitude, researchers have found TOT happens more for bilinguals (they have more words to sift through), older people and individuals with brain damage. "This can be incredibly frustrating --you know you know the word, but you just can''t quite get it."
. . The time spent not remembering causes our brains to reinforce that "mistake pathway".
. . The brain works --it reinforces whatever it does. The period in which people continue to rack their brains for the answer could be referred to as "error learning", Humphreys said. "You'll keep on digging yourself the wrong pathway, you either have 10 seconds worth of that extra bad learning or you have 30 seconds worth of that extra bad learning."
. . In a follow-up study, the researchers found the best way to tackle mistake-learning is to repeat the word (out loud or in your head) once you find the correct answer. And instead of trying to recall the elusive word, stop and ask a colleague or look it up on the Web.
. . The findings should apply to other situations, including music and sports. "Music teachers know this principle' they tell you to practice slowly", Humphreys said. "If you practice fast, you'll just practice your mistakes."
Apr 22, 08: A mindless mistake on a monotonous task may feel like a momentary glitch, but its mental roots run deep. In a study, researchers used fMRI machines to record neurological patterns preceding careless errors.
. . The recordings revealed a cascade of shifting activity in the parts of the brain associated with focusing attention and maintaining routines. Researchers observed test subjects' minds going on autopilot up to half a minute before the subjects actually made mistakes, even though the subjects weren't aware of their own lapses of attention.
. . If the same mechanisms produce other, more meaningful errors --slips on the assembly line or behind a steering wheel-- then the research could be used to design biofeedback systems that could catch mistakes before they're made.
Apr 16, 08: About 300,000 U.S. troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan suffer symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder or depression, but about half receive no care, an independent study said.
Apr 7, 08: UK researchers have recently used virtual reality (VR) —-interactive immersive computer environments-— to check if people had paranoid thoughts when using public transportation. Their VR tube ride experiment revealed that 40% of the participants experienced exaggerated fears about threats from others.
. . “Paranoid thoughts are often triggered by ambiguous events such as people looking in one’s direction or hearing laughter in a room but it is very difficult to recreate such social interactions. Virtual reality allows us to do just that, to look at how different people interpret exactly the same social situation. It is a uniquely powerful method to detect those liable to misinterpret other people.”
Apr 3, 08: By 2020, the terms "interface" and "user" will be obsolete as computers merge ever closer with humans. It is one prediction in a Microsoft-backed report drawn from the discussions of 45 academics from the fields of computing, science, sociology and psychology. Boundaries between humans and computers will become blurred over the next decade as devices are embedded in objects, our clothing or, in the case of medical monitoring, in our bodies.
. . The report dubs this the era of so-called hyper-connectivity and predicts it will mean a growth in "techno-dependency". This ever more intimate relationship between humans and computers will be a double-edged sword, it suggests. "Without proper consideration and control it is possible that we --both individually and collectively-- may no longer be in control of ourselves or the world around us", the report warns.
Apr 3, 08: Bruce Schneier: If we make security trade-offs based on the feeling of security rather than the reality, we choose security that makes us feel more secure over security that actually makes us more secure. And that's what governments, companies, family members and everyone else provide. Of course, there are two ways to make people feel more secure. The first is to make people actually more secure and hope they notice. The second is to make people feel more secure without making them actually more secure, and hope they don't notice.
. . The key here is whether we notice. The feeling and reality of security tend to converge when we take notice, and diverge when we don't. People notice when 1) there are enough positive and negative examples to draw a conclusion, and 2) there isn't too much emotion clouding the issue.
. . The other thing that matters is agenda. There are lots of people, politicians, companies and so on who deliberately try to manipulate your feeling of security for their own gain. They try to cause fear. They invent threats. They take minor threats and make them major. And when they talk about rare risks with only a few incidents to base an assessment on — terrorism is the big example here — they are more likely to succeed.
Apr 10, 08: Police facing emotional strains due to financial or romantic problems could be stripped of their department-issued handguns in China's Jiangxi province, a newspaper reported.
Mar 27, 08: Know how a whiff of certain odors can take you back in time, either to a great memory or bad one? It turns out emotion plays an even bigger role with the nose, and that your sense of smell actually can sharpen when something bad happens. Northwestern U researchers proved the surprising connection by giving volunteers electric shocks while they sniffed novel odors.
. . The discovery helps explain how our senses can steer us clear of danger. More intriguing, it could shed light on disorders such as post-traumatic stress syndrome. A certain perfume or scent of baking pie, for instance, can raise memories of a long-dead loved one. Conversely, a whiff of diesel fuel might trigger a flashback for a soldier suffering PTSD.
Mar 20, 08: The Bible counsels misers that it's better to give than to receive. Science agrees. People who made gifts to others or to charities reported they were happier than folks who didn't share, according to a report in the journal Science.
. . While previous studies have shown that having more money can increase happiness, the researchers at the U of British Columbia and Harvard U wondered if the way people spent their money made any difference.
. . Turns out, it does. She was struck by how big the effect was and that how people spent money was more important than how much money they had.
Mar 20, 08: Punishing a lazy team member can be counterproductive and it may be better to simply walk away, researchers said. The researchers at Harvard U found that people who go to the trouble of punishing colleagues, co-workers or others in one-on-one situations do not profit from their revenge. Such behavior does not pay off for a group, either, they reported.
Mar 20, 08: A happy marriage is good for your blood pressure, but a stressed one can be worse than being single, a preliminary study suggests. That second finding is a surprise because prior studies have shown that married people tend to be healthier than singles.
. . Analysis found that the more marital satisfaction and adjustment spouses reported, the lower their average blood pressure was over the 24 hours and during the daytime.
. . But spouses who scored low in marital satisfaction had higher average blood pressure than single people did. During the daytime, their average was about five points higher, entering a range that's considered a warning sign.
Mar 18, 08: Residents of a small South Korean island turned on to their wives after turning off their televisions for three weeks in an unusual social experiment, a report said. The vast majority said later that their lives had become much richer, with more time for reading, conversations between spouses and religious activities. "My eyes used to be glued to the TV but now I look at my wife and find her prettier than before."
Mar 12, 08: Short people should pray for a return to the Seventies fashion of stack heels, for the power of jealousy depends on how tall you are, the New Scientist says. Researchers at the U of Groningen in the Netherlands and U of Valencia in Spain asked 549 Dutch and Spanish men and women to rate how jealous they felt, and to list the qualities in a romantic competitor that were most likely to make them ill at ease.
. . Men generally felt most nervous about attractive, rich and strong rivals. But these feelings were increasingly relaxed the taller they were themselves. The more vertically challenged the man, the greater his feelings of jealousy.
. . For women, what counted most in jealousy was the rival's looks and charm, but these feelings were less intense if the woman herself was of average height. This makes sense in evolutionary terms, says New Scientist.
Mar 12, 08: Scientists at Durham U say sports teams wearing red are more likely to come out on top.
Mar 5, 08: Our level of happiness throughout life is strongly influenced by the genes with which we were born, say experts. An Edinburgh U study of identical and non-identical twins suggests genes may control half the personality traits keeping us happy. The other half is linked to lifestyle, career and relationships.
. . However, another expert said despite the research, we can still train ourselves to be more content. The science of happiness is a growing field, with demand from both the public and industry for insights into emotional wellbeing. "What it means is that, rather than a single point, people have a range of possible levels of happiness --and it is perfectly possible to influence this with techniques that are empirically proven to work. Simple things, like listing your strengths and using them in new ways every day, or keeping a journal where you write down, every night, three things that you are grateful for, have been shown to deliver improvements."
Mar 2, 08: Defects in working memory --the brain's temporary storage bin-- may explain why one child cannot read her history book and another gets lost in algebra, new research suggests. As many as 10% of school age children may suffer from poor working memory, British researchers said in a report last week, yet the problem remains rarely identified. "Some psychologists consider working memory to be the new IQ because we find that working memory is the single most important predictor of learning", Alloway said.
. . Many children with poor working memory are considered lazy or dim. But Alloway said with early identification and memory training, many of these underachievers can improve.
. . Working memory allows people to hold and manipulate a few items in their minds, such as a fone number. Alloway compares working memory to a box. For adults, the basic box size is thought to be three to five items. People who have more than that on a mental grocery list are likely to forget something. "Since there is this limit, it is important to put in the right thing. Irrelevant information will clutter up working memory."
. . The question many researchers are struggling with is how to help people with this problem, which appears to be closely tied with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. Levine said working memory allows a reader to remember what is at the beginning of the page when reaching the end of the page. Kids with trouble with active working memory get lost in the middle.
Feb 28, 08: Psychologist Philip Zimbardo has seen good people turn evil, and he thinks he knows why. Zimbardo spoke at the TED conference.
. . Zimbardo conducted a now-famous experiment at Stanford University in 1971, involving students who posed as prisoners and guards. Five days into the experiment, Zimbardo halted the study when the student guards began abusing the prisoners, forcing them to strip naked and simulate sex acts.
. . His book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, explores how a "perfect storm" of conditions can make ordinary people commit horrendous acts. "Understanding the reason for someone's behavior is not the same as excusing it. The way to prevent evil actions is to teach the "banality of kindness" -- that is, to get society to exemplify ordinary people who engage in extraordinary moral actions. If you're a whistle-blower you're going to get fired, you're not going to get promoted, you're going to get ostracized. And you have to say it doesn't matter. Most heroes are more effective when they're social heroes rather than isolated heroes. A single person or even two can get dismissed by the system. But once you have three people, then it's the start of an opposition.
. . "So what I'm trying to promote is not only the importance of each individual thinking "I'm a hero" and waiting for the right situation to come along in which I will act on behalf of some people or some principle, but also, "I'm going to learn the skills to influence other people to join me in that heroic action."
Feb 27, 08: Every day, we pressure ourselves to control our impulses -—to work harder rather than go home early, to avoid sugar, carbohydrates, and transfats; to save instead of spend.
. . "People have a limited amount of self-control, and tasks requiring controlled, willful action quickly deplete this central resource. Exerting self-control on one task impairs performance on subsequent tasks requiring the same resource", write Michael Inzlicht and Jennifer Gutsell in their article. Exercising control on one task makes it harder to exercise control on the task immediately following.
Feb 27, 08: A friendly dog can make older people feel less isolated --and it appears to make little difference if that wagging tail belongs to a robot doggie or the real thing.
. . Researchers at Saint Louis U compared a 16 kg, floppy-eared mutt named Sparky with AIBO, a far-from-lifelike robot dog, to see how residents of three U.S. nursing homes would respond. "The most surprising thing is they worked almost equally well in terms of alleviating loneliness and causing residents to form attachments." Many senior citizens are too frail to care for a pet or have had to give up their own animals when they went to the nursing home. "They really miss that bond."
Feb 27, 08: The parental bond may be all in the mind, according to a study that pinpoints a possible region of the brain key to an instinctive desire to care for and nurture infants. This discovery helps answer the evolutionary question of why we view babies as special and could help doctors better identify people suffering from postnatal depression.
. . A region of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex lights up to faces of infants but not to adults. Scientists believe this area --located just above the eyeballs and connected to the area important for recognizing faces-- is key to controlling emotions, Kringelbach said. The parental response to infants was similar among men, women and volunteers in the study who didn't have children, providing evidence that this reaction is innate, he added.
. . The findings could help doctors identify the 15% of women and 3% of men in the developed world who suffer from postnatal depression.
Feb 25, 08: Aggression in some teenage boys may be linked to overly large Amygdalas in their brains, a study by scientists in Australia and the US has found. In an article, they said these boys may also be unable to control their emotions because other parts of the brain that normally control strong emotions don't mature till the early 20s.
. . In the study, 137 12-year-old boys and their parents were asked to discuss sensitive issues, such as homework, bed times and Internet times; and the boys had their brains scanned later.
. . "Boys who had large amygdalas spent more time behaving in an aggressive way", Allen said, referring to a part of the brain located deep within the medial temporal lobes that is believed to be involved with emotional responses, including arousal and fear. These boys also appeared to have small prefrontal cortexes, a region of the brain that has to do with regulating emotions.
Feb 19, 08: U of Oxford researchers will spend nearly $4 million to study why mankind embraces God. The grant to the Ian Ramsey Center for Science and Religion will bring anthropologists, theologians, philosophers and other academics together for three years to study whether belief in a divine being is a basic part of mankind's makeup.
. . "There are a lot of issues. What is it that is innate in human nature to believe in God, whether it is gods or something superhuman or supernatural?"
Gilbert, the author of Stumbling on Happiness, says ...experience demands our attention, leaving us little time to ponder alternatives to it. “We think we will be thinking about the roads not taken", says Gilbert, “but the fact is that whatever road we choose in life requires that we navigate it, and doing so limits our ability to compare that road to its alternatives.”
Feb 13, 08: Love really is blind, at least when it comes to looking at others, U.S. researchers reported. College students who reported they were in love were less likely to take careful notice of other attractive men or women.
. . "Feeling love for your romantic partner appears to make everybody else less attractive, and the emotion appears to work in very specific ways in enabling you to push thoughts of that tempting other out of your mind", said Gian Gonzaga of eHarmony.
Feb 13, 08: Australia apologized for the historic mistreatment of Aborigines, heralding a new era in race relations and moving indigenous people to tears as huge crowds cheered across the nation.
Feb 12, 08: The best "catches" in dating land may be the worst choices in the long-run, new research shows. Popular people who monitor themselves carefully in social situations and thereby appear to be the most socially appropriate are often highly sought after as romantic partners, a study finds, but these people show less satisfaction and commitment in relationships than socially-awkward people.
. . "High self-monitors are social chameleons", said Northwestern U professor of communication studies Michael E. Roloff."And, because they're quick to pick up on social cues, are socially adept and unlikely to say things upsetting to others, they are generally well-liked and sought after. Research finds [self-monitors] to be excellent negotiators and far more likely to be promoted at work than their low self-monitoring peers”, Roloff said.
. . But there’s a downside for high self-monitors when it comes to their romantic relationships. "High self-monitors may appear to be the kind of people we want to have relationships with, but they themselves are less committed to and less happy in their relationships than low self-monitors", Roloff said.
. . The problem seems to be that they can't turn the self-monitoring off. "It's not that high self-monitors are intentionally deceptive or evil", Roloff said. "They appear to have an outlook and way of achieving their goals that makes them attractive to us socially but that prevents them from being particularly happy or loyal in their romantic relationships."
. . Conversely, the researchers found that low self-monitors — people who are the least concerned with social appropriateness and are unlikely to mask their feelings or opinions to avoid confrontation or preserve their self-image — are more committed to and more satisfied with their relationships.
. . Those awkward people who always seem to be sticking their feet in their mouths may ultimately be more genuine and capable of intimate relationships. However, their honesty and loyalty can extract a price from their partners, because they may be more likely to say blunt and hurtful things.
Feb 8, 08: Nearly half of British men surveyed would give up sex for six months in return for a 50-inch plasma TV, a survey --perhaps unsurprisingly carried out for a firm selling televisions-- said. The firm found 47% of men would give up sex for half a year, compared to just over a third of women. "It seems that size really does matter more for men than women."
. . A quarter of people said they would give up smoking, with roughly the same proportion willing to give up chocolate.
Feb 6, 08: If your spouse already bugs you now, the future is bleak. New research suggests couples view one another as even more irritating and demanding the longer they are together. The same trend was not found for relationships with children or friends.
. . The study results could be a consequence of accumulated contact with a spouse, such that the nitpicking or frequent demands that once triggered just a mild chafe develops into a major pain. But accumulated irritation has its silver lining. "As we age and become closer and more comfortable with one another, it could be that we're more able to express ourselves to each other." "Because we found that pattern was overall among the participants, it appears to be normative.
. . Participants in their 20s and 30s reported having the most negative relationships overall. Older adults had the least negative relationships.
Feb 4, 08: Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real.
Feb 4, 08: Having daddy around when they are growing up is good for little girls — even if they are little baboon girls. While that's well known for people, it's a bit of a surprise for non-human primates. But a report found that female baboons in Kenya raised in groups with their fathers matured earlier and had a longer reproductive life than other baboons.
. . Males had not been thought to be engaged in a level of care that would make any difference to their offspring. "Sons also experienced accelerated maturation if their father was present during their immature period, but only if their father was high-ranking at the time of their birth."
. . Baboons do not share food after their mothers cease nursing, but the father's presence during early maturity may still help daughters get more to eat if the father reduces any harassment of their offspring.
Jan 22, 08: A good argument with your spouse could be just what the doctor ordered. Preliminary results from a survey of married couples suggest that disputing husbands and wives who hold in their anger die earlier than expressive couples.
. . "When couples get together, one of their main jobs is reconciliation about conflict", said researcher Ernest Harburg. "Usually nobody is trained to do this. If they have good parents, they can imitate, that's fine, but usually the couple is ignorant about the process of resolving conflict."
. . The findings add to past research showing that the release of anger can be healthy. For instance, one study revealed when people are angry they tend to make better decisions, perhaps because this emotion triggers the brain to ignore irrelevant cues and focus on the meat of the matter. Individuals who express anger might also have a sense of control and optimism over a situation, according to another past study. Bottled anger adds to stress, which tends to shorten lives, many studies show.
. . The researchers found that 26 couples, meaning 52 individuals, were suppressors in which both partners held in their anger. 25% of the suppressors died during the study period compared with about 12% for the other remaining couples.
. . In 27% of the suppressor couples, one member of the couple died during the study period, and in 23% of those couples, both died during the study period. That's compared to only 6% of couples where both spouses died in the remaining three groups combined. Only 19% in the remaining three groups combined saw one partner die during the study period.
Jan 21, 08: It's no secret culture influences your food preferences and taste in music. But now scientists say it impacts the hard-wiring of your brain. New research shows that people from different cultures use their brains differently to solve basic perceptual tasks.
. . Neuroscientists asked Americans and East Asians to solve basic shape puzzles while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. They found that both groups could successfully complete the tasks, but American brains had to work harder at relative judgments, while East Asian brains found absolute judgments more challenging.
. . Previous psychology research has shown that American culture focuses on the individual and values independence, while East Asian culture is more community-focused and emphasizes seeing people and objects in context. This study provides the first neurological evidence that these cultural differences extend to brain activity patterns.
. . Gabrieli said he is interested in testing whether brain patterns change if a person immigrates. "There's a hint that six months in a culture already changes you", he said, referring to psychological, rather than neurological, research. "It suggests that there's a lot of flexibility."
Jan 18, 08: Children don't like clowns and even older kids are scared of them. The study, reported in the Nursing Standard magazine, found all the 250 patients aged between four and 16 they quizzed disliked the use of clowns, with even the older ones finding them scary.
. . "As adults we make assumptions about what works for children", said Penny Curtis, a senior lecturer in research at the university. "We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable."
Jan 15, 08: The more wine costs, the more people enjoy it, regardless of how it tastes, a study by California researchers has found.
Jan 7, 08: New research conducted by brain researcher Avi Karni of the U of Haifa in Israel explores the possibility that naps help lock in sometimes fleeting long-term memories. A 90-minute daytime snooze might help the most, the study finds.
Jan 7, 08: Australian animal protection groups questioned a new government guide for the humane killing of kangaroos which recommends "forcefully swinging" the heads of young animals against a vehicle tow bar.
Jan 3, 08: Australia is suffering through its worst dry spell in a millennium. The outback has turned into a dust bowl, crops are dying off at fantastic rates, cities are rationing water, coral reefs are dying, and the agricultural base is evaporating.
. . But what really intrigues Glenn Albrecht —-a philosopher by training-— is how his fellow Australians are reacting. They're getting sad.
. . In interviews Albrecht conducted over the past few years, scores of Australians described their deep, wrenching sense of loss as they watch the landscape around them change. Familiar plants don't grow any more. Gardens won't take. Birds are gone. "They no longer feel like they know the place they've lived for decades."
. . Albrecht believes that this is a new type of sadness. People are feeling displaced. They're suffering symptoms eerily similar to those of indigenous populations that are forcibly removed from their traditional homelands. It's just that the familiar markers of their area, the physical and sensory signals that define home, are vanishing. Their environment is moving away from them.
. . Albrecht has given this syndrome an evocative name: solastalgia. It's a mashup of the roots solacium (comfort) and algia (pain), which together aptly conjure the word nostalgia. In essence, it's pining for a lost environment. "Solastalgia", as he wrote in a scientific paper describing his theory, "is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.'"
. . We should also be concerned about the huge toll climate change will inflict on our mental health. In the modern, industrialized West, many of us have forgotten how deeply we rely on the stability of nature for our psychic well-being. In a world that's quickly heating up and drying up, you can't go home again —-even if you never leave.
Dec 12, 07: In The Matrix, the hero Neo could dodge bullets because time moved in slow motion for him during battles. Indeed, in the real world, people in danger often feel as if time slowed down for them. This warping of time apparently does not result from the brain speeding up from adrenaline when in danger. Instead, this feeling seems to be an illusion, scientists now find.
. . Scientists had volunteers dive backward with no ropes attached, into a special net that helped break their fall. They reached 70 mph during the roughly three-second, 150-foot drop.
. . Volunteers estimated their own fall lasted about a third longer than dives they saw other volunteers take. When a person is scared, a brain area called the amygdala becomes more active, laying down an extra set of memories that go along with those normally taken care of by other parts of the brain. "The more memory you have of an event, the longer you believe it took."
Nov 26, 07: To test what effect doctored photos might have, researchers from the U of California, Irvine, and the U of Padua in Italy showed 299 people aged 19 to 84 either an actual photo or an altered photo of two historical events, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest in Beijing and the 2003 anti-war protest in Rome.
. . The original Tiananmen Square image was altered to show a crowd watching at the sidelines as a lone man stands in front of a row of tanks. The Rome anti-war protest photograph was altered to show riot police and a menacing, masked protester among the crowd of demonstrators.
. . When answering questions about the events, the participants had differing recollections of what happened. Those who viewed the altered images of the Rome protest recalled the demonstration as violent and negative and recollected more physical confrontation and property damage than actually occurred.
. . Participants who viewed the doctored photos also said they were less inclined to take part in future protests, according to the study, detailed in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.
. . "It’s potentially a form of human engineering that could be applied to us against our knowledge and against our wishes, and we ought to be vigilant about it", said UC Irvine psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who designed the study. "With the addition of a few little upsetting and arousing elements in the Rome protest photo, people remembered this peaceful protest as being more violent than it was, and as a society we have to figure how we can regulate this."
Nov 23, 07: Brain scans show that men measure their success not just by the size of their paypacket, but its size compared with others.
Nov 21, 07: Even infants can tell the difference between naughty and nice playmates, and know which to choose, a new study finds. Babies as young as 6 to 10 months old showed crucial social judging skills before they could talk, according to a study by researchers at Yale.
. . The infants watched a googly-eyed wooden toy trying to climb roller-coaster hills and then another googly-eyed toy come by and either help it over the mountain or push it backward. They then were presented with the toys to see which they would play with. Nearly every baby picked the helpful toy over the bad one. The babies also chose neutral toys —-ones that didn't help or hinder-— over the naughty ones. And the babies chose the helping toys over the neutral ones. "It's incredibly impressive that babies can do this."
. . There was no difference in reaction between the boys and girls, but when the researchers took away the large eyes that made the toys somewhat lifelike, the babies didn't show the same social judging skills.
. . A study last year out of Germany showed that babies as young as 18 months old overwhelmingly helped out when they could, such as by picking up toys that researchers dropped.
. . David Lewkowicz, a psychology professor at Florida Atlantic U in Boca Raton who wasn't part of the study, said the Yale research was intriguing. But he doesn't buy into the natural ability part. He said the behavior was learned, and that the new research doesn't prove otherwise.
. . But the Yale team has other preliminary research that shows similar responses even in 3-month-olds, Hamlin said. Researchers also want to know if the behavior is limited to human infants. The Yale team is starting tests with monkeys, but has no results yet.
Nov 21, 07: Stravinsky regarded natural sounds as merely hints while real music required a human agent to order its tones. The great ornithologist, Charles Hartshorne, disagreed and found in birdsong every familiar musical feature, including accelerando, crescendo, diminuendo and changes of key and tone. Studies of nightingales show that their song, when recorded and broken down, is composed of hundreds of distinct notes in a five-second burst.
. . The singer Angela Gheorghiu claims that sex immediately before a performance improves her coloratura. Led Zeppelin's singer Robert Plant said that in all his music he was "on my way to love".
Nov 19, 07: Tired of traffic jams, late trains, packed buses? Telecommuting can be a big plus for workers and employers because it boosts morale and job satisfaction and cuts stress, researchers said.
Nov 15, 07: Optimism, it turns out, is best in moderation. People who have a rosy outlook are more likely than others to make prudent financial decisions, but those who are extreme optimists make riskier investments and save less money than others, a new study finds.
They find that compared with others, optimists:
. . * Work longer hours
. . * Invest in individual stocks
. . * Save more money
. . * Are more likely to pay their credit card balances on time
. . * Believe their income will grow over the next five years
. . * Plan to retire later, or not at all
. . * Are more likely to remarry if divorced
In comparison, extreme optimists:
. . * Work significantly fewer hours
. . * Hold a higher proportion of individual stocks in their portfolios
. . * Are more likely to be day traders
. . * Save less money
. . * Are less likely to pay off their credit card balances on a regular basis
. . * Are more likely to smoke
Nov 13, 07: U.S. soldiers are significantly more likely to report mental health problems six months after returning home from combat than on initial assessments, Army researchers said.
Oct 31, 07: "There's a substantial overlap between those brain areas involved in processing fear and pleasure", said Allan Kalueff, a neuroscientist at the U of Tampere in Finland.
. . Experiments on rats have also shown that damaging their amygdalae interferes with their capacity to feel fear, suggesting an overlap between such seemingly opposite emotions as pleasure and fright. "The amygdala gets just as activated by fear as it would in the real world, but because your cortex knows you're not in danger, that spillover is rewarding and not frightening", said Yerkes National Primate Research Center neuroscientist Kerry Ressler.
. . Like the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens also processes both pleasure and fear. It is a collection of neurons located just behind your forehead. Its dual role may explain why deep-brain stimulation, an electrical therapy used to treat psychiatric disorders and Parkinson's disease, sometimes causes feelings of panic.
. . Why would our brains work this way? It seems it would make more sense to separate the two forms of stimulation. But Kalueff thinks the arrangement is genius. "If arousal is only pleasant or only unpleasant, that doesn't make sense. Situations change all the time. What's pleasant now could be unpleasant tomorrow", he said. "It's up to the brain to decide, to the individual to decide, whether it's danger or pleasure."
. . It's also possible, however, that it's just an evolutionary quirk, a bit of crossed wiring produced by fitting a mind more powerful than any supercomputer into a melon-sized chassis.
. . Psychologists say that watching scary movies is a way of testing and overcoming our limitations, similar to bungee jumping and other extreme sports. "That could be why scary movies and games are so popular with children. They're at a point in their lives when they're testing their boundaries", said Kansas State U psychologist Leon Rappoport. "By the time they get to college age or later, they've had enough of them."
Oct 29, 07: Scientists say they now know better what's going on inside our brains when a spook jumps out and scares us. Knowing how fear rules the brain should lead to treatments for a major medical problem: When irrational fears go haywire.
. . "We're making a lot of progress", said U of Michigan psychology professor Stephen Maren. "We're taking all of what we learned from the basic studies of animals and bringing that into the clinical practices that help people. Things are starting to come together in a very important way."
. . About 40 million Americans suffer from anxiety disorders. A Harvard Medical School study estimated the annual cost to the U.S. economy in 1999 at roughly $42 billion.
. . Fear is a basic primal emotion that is key to evolutionary survival. It's one we share with animals. Genetics plays a big role in the development of overwhelming — and needless — fear, psychologists say. But so do traumatic events. "Fear is a funny thing", said Ted Abel, a fear researcher at the U of Pennsylvania. "One needs enough of it, but not too much of it."
. . The fear hot spot is the amygdala, an almond-shaped part of the deep brain. The amygdala isn't responsible for all of people's fear response, but it's like the burglar alarm that connects to everything else.
. . Scientists found D-cycloserine, a drug already used to fight hard-to-treat tuberculosis, strengthens that good chemical reaction in mice. Working in combination with therapy, it seems to do the same in people. It was first shown effective with people who have a fear of heights. It also worked in tests with other types of fea
. . Volunteers were bombarded with pictures of faces showing fear, happiness and no expression. They quickly recognized and reacted to the faces of fear —-even when it was turned upside down. "We think we have some built-in shortcuts of the brain that serve the role that helps us detect anything that could be threatening."
. . Other studies have shown that just by being very afraid, other bodily functions change. One study found that very frightened people can withstand more pain than those not experiencing fear. Another found that experiencing fear or merely perceiving it in others improved people's attention and brain skills.
Oct 29, 07: Young men drive fast because speed is perceived as inherently male, a team of Swiss and German researchers claimed in a study. They found that men who were exposed to a "typically male environment" drove "significantly" faster than when they were in female or neutral environments. They accelerated when they were played words such as 'muscle' or 'beard' --which were taken to evoke masculine traits-- over the car radio in the simulated male environment.
. . In the female environment, words like 'lipstick' or 'pink' were played and they drove about two kilometers an hour slower. Similar results were found with the simulated neutral environment --words like 'table' or chair'.
Oct 19, 07: Psychologists have long understood that some people are more vulnerable than others to stress, which can lead to depression and even post-traumatic stress disorder. But little is known about mechanisms in the brain that explain this vulnerability.
. . What they found was mice that were most vulnerable to stress had too much of a chemical in a region of the brain that processes reward signals. And they found a significant increase in this same chemical in humans with depression. It turns out that resilient mice produce a kind of protective response that allows them to recover from stress. Vulnerable mice lack this defense.
. . They placed genetically similar mice into a cage with a large, aggressive mouse --basically a bully. Then they recorded their ability to interact socially, especially when exposed to other, more aggressive mice. While some behaved timidly even 30 days after the bully encounter, others had shaken it off and were able to interact normally.
. . The researchers then looked at two of the brain's reward centers --the ventral tegmental area and the nucleus accumbens-- to see if there were differences there. These areas are part of the reward circuit of the brain and also known to be involved in fear conditioning.
. . What they found is that neurons were firing rapidly in the stressed-out mice, releasing a nerve growth factor called brain-derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF that has been linked with poor coping skills. Vulnerable mice showed an increase of BDNF in the nucleus accumbens; resilient ones did not. Resilient mice put the brakes on this excess neuron firing.
. . Krishnan said the finding is important because the researchers also found high concentrations of BDNF in tissue taken from this same brain region in depressed people. "It seems to be a signature of vulnerability to depression." The researchers think the finding might help lead to new therapies that build up resiliency in people.
Oct 15, 07: Gossip is more powerful than truth, a study showed, suggesting people believe what they hear through the grapevine even if they have evidence to the contrary.
. . Researchers, testing students using a computer game, also found gossip played an important role when people make decisions, said Ralf Sommerfeld, an evolutionary biologist at the Max Planck Institute in Germany, who led the study. "We show that gossip has a strong influence... even when participants have access to the original information as well as gossip about the same information." "Rationally, if you know what the people did, you should care, but they still listened to what others said", he said. "They even reacted on it if they knew better."
. . In evolutionary terms, gossip can be an important tool for people to acquire information about others' reputations or navigate through social networks at work and in their everyday lives, the study said. One example could be using gossip to learn that a potential mate had cheated on others, something which could make that person an undesirable match, Sommerfeld said.
Oct 14, 07: Smiles may take a while, but a horrified expression is a sure-fire attention getter, U.S. researchers said, based on a study of how fast people process facial expressions.
Oct 3, 07: A study of 30 Roomba users found the owners of the robotic vacuum cleaner often developing emotional attachments to their little bundles of plastic, metal and wiring. Of the 30 people in the study, 21 of them named their Roombas. People give them nicknames, worry when they signal for help and sometimes even treat them like trusted pets.
Oct 1, 07: Playing with blocks helps young children gain language skills, a small study concluded. After six months, language scores among half of 175 children aged 1-1/2 to 2-1/2 who were sent plastic blocks were 15% higher than a matched group that did not receive the free blocks.
. . Unstructured play with blocks stimulates thinking, memory and physical mastery of objects at a time when a child's brain is growing rapidly. "They are the precursors of thought and language", he wrote.
Sept 29, 07: Scientists have known that on the whole, females of all ages tend to worry more and have more intense worries than males. Women also tend to perceive more risk in situations and grow more anxious than men. Now we know why.
. . Women are more likely than men to believe that past experiences accurately forecast the future, according to two new studies.
. . The research, involving both 3- to 6-year-olds and adults of both genders, tested the extent to which participants' thought that worry can be caused by thinking that a bad event that happened in the past could happen again in the future. (This skill, in its simplest form, is critical to social understanding as it is important to making decisions and assessing risk.)
Sept 27, 07: Assisted suicide is legal in Switzerland and has been allowed since the 1940s. Non-physicians can participate in assisted suicide but euthanasia is not legal. The laws, some of the most liberal in the world, have led in recent years to "suicide tourism", where terminally ill foreigners travel to Switzerland to die. By mid-2006, Minelli said he helped arrange 573 deaths through Dignitas, formed in 1998.
Sept 25, 07: Not only is acupuncture better for lower back pain than drugs, exercise and physical therapy, but even fake acupuncture is more effective. German researchers put 1,000 people with chronic lower back pain into three groups: acupuncture, fake acupuncture (though they didn't know it, of course) or standard therapies.
. . After six months, half the people receiving acupuncture --real or fake-- reported improvement. Only one-quarter of those getting conventional therapies felt better. If sticking acupuncture needles into random places (and avoiding those spots thought to relieve pain) worked just as well as real acupuncture, then the treatment might be, in a sense, a sham. But it would be much less of a sham than all the things we currently regard as legitimate therapies.
. . How could it work, then? Perhaps it's the so-called "placebo effect" --you believe you're going to get better, so you do. If so, this would doubly condemn drugs and exercise and physiotherapy as being too useless to even work as placebos.
Sept 25, 07: What's the most important psychology experiment that hasn't been done? The British Psychological Society asked this question of leading psychologists and bloggers, and is collecting the responses on their blog. One of the more interesting, suggested by Susan Blackmore: watching death.
. . Take fMRI or PET scans of people as they die; either those who really do go on to die, or those who suffer clinical death but are resuscitated. If this were done we would be able to test theories about how NDEs and mystical experiences are generated in the dying brain, and answer questions about the timing of the experiences. Perhaps even this would not resolve the final question once and for all, but it would certainly bring us a lot closer to knowing what happens when we die.
. . And why has it not been done? Because when someone is dying it is far more important to try to save their life than to do a scientific experiment. Nevertheless it could be done, and I hope that one day the technology will be so unobtrusive and easy to use that the ethical problem will disappear and we will be able to watch the dying brain as easily as we can now watch the living brain.
Sept 10, 07: [I heard of this many years ago...] A susceptibility to contagious yawning may actually be a sign of a high-level of social empathy. Although many species yawn, only some humans and possibly their close animal relatives find yawning infectious, suggesting the reason is psychological.
. . "You don't need a visual cue, you don't even need an auditory cue --you can just read about it or think about it and it gets you going. "We believe that contagious yawning indicates empathy. It indicates an appreciation of other people's behavioural and physiological state," she added. Recent neuro-imaging has shown that the same area of the brain is involved when reacting to yawning and when considering others.
. . Each student was shown to an occupied waiting room where their companion was actually a researcher who yawned 10 times in 10 minutes. The scientists recorded how often the students yawned in response.
. . The results showed that those who had succumbed to the most contagious yawning also scored higher on the empathy tests. There was also a clear difference between the subjects studied. Psychology students were more susceptible to contagious yawning, and scored significantly higher on the empathy test than did the engineering students.
Aug 28, 07: The US has 90 guns for every 100 citizens, making it the most heavily armed society in the world, a report said. U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies. About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said.
. . India had the world's second-largest civilian gun arsenal, with an estimated 46 million firearms outside law enforcement and the military, though this represented just four guns per 100 people there. China, ranked third with 40 million privately held guns, had 3 firearms per 100 people.
. . On a per-capita basis, Yemen had the second most heavily armed citizenry behind the United States, with 61 guns per 100 people, followed by Finland with 56, Switzerland with 46, Iraq with 39 and Serbia with 38.
Aug 23, 07: Scientists using a computer game have discovered how the brain's response to fear changes as a threat gets nearer in a development that could help people suffering from panic attacks.
Aug 23, 07: Researchers have found a way to induce out-of-body experiences using virtual-reality goggles, helping to explain a phenomenon reported by about one in 10 people. The illusion of watching oneself from several meters away while awake is often reported by people undergoing strokes or epileptic seizures or using drugs.
. . In the studies, two teams of researchers managed to induce the effect in healthy people by scrambling their senses of vision and touch with the aid of the goggles. "We ... describe an illusion during which healthy participants experienced a virtual body as if it were their own, and localized their 'selves' outside their body borders at a different position in space", wrote Olaf Blanke.
. . One team, led by Henrik Ehrsson at U College London, had volunteers sit in a chair in the middle of a room wearing virtual-reality goggles showing the view from a video camera placed behind them. A researcher moved a rod up to the camera at the same time as the person's chest was touched, and then the rod disappeared from view. This created the illusion that the person was sitting a few steps back, where the camera stood.
. . In Blanke's experiment, subjects wearing virtual-reality goggles watched an image of a mannequin representing their own body placed directly in front of them while a researcher scratched their back. Afterwards, the volunteers were blindfolded and guided backwards. When they were asked to return to their original positions, they went toward the place where they had seen their virtual body --the mannequin.
. . The researchers said mixing up the senses of sight and touch was key to the experiments. This type of experiment could help to shed light on philosophical questions surrounding the sense of self, and could also lead to more practical applications in video games or remote surgery, the researchers said.
Aug 22, 07: Mice born without a key brain protein developed obsessive compulsive symptoms that went away when treated with anti-anxiety drugs, giving new clues about the brain mechanism behind the disorder, researchers said.
. . Mice who lacked the gene SAPAP3 --which makes a protein that helps nerves communicate-- groomed their faces until they bled, and developed an aversion for bright, open spaces.
. . Further testing showed the mice were excessively anxious. When placed in a dark box with a door leading to bright open spaces, normal mice would venture out but mice who lacked the protein remained inside the box. When the researchers restored the missing gene, the mice behaved normally.
. . Fluoxetine, an anti-anxiety drug sold by Eli Lilly and Co. under the brand name Prozac and used to treat OCD symptoms in humans, also relieved the symptoms.
Aug 21, 07: Boys like blue, girls like pink and there isn't much anybody can do about it, researchers said on Monday in one of the first studies to show scientifically that there are gender-based color preferences.
Aug 8, 07: The next time you're invited to a party but afraid to go, try approaching this: shyness may affect up to 40% of the population, but it doesn't have to be a life sentence. People can overcome their shyness with preparation followed by slowly engaging themselves in new social situations, according to psychologists.
. . Perhaps it comes as no surprise that one of the world's foremost experts in shyness, Bernardo Carducci, has battled with shyness himself. Carducci says that despite beliefs to the contrary, shyness is not completely hardwired.
. . This is because shyness requires a sense of self—which develops only after about 18 months of age. It involves feelings of excessive self-consciousness, negative self-evaluation and negative self-preoccupation, he explained.
. . Genes do, however, seem to play a role. About 15% of babies are born with what is called an "inhibited temperament" -—meaning that they react stressfully to new experiences. They might cower at the sound of a bursting balloon, for instance. And if one identical twin is shy, the other also is likely to be shy.
. . In a nutshell, shy people want to be outgoing and friendly, but can't seem to figure out how to do it, Carducci said. They are also slow to "warm up" in new social situations, partly because they are so self-conscious.
. . Finally, shy people tend to have what Carducci calls a "limited comfort zone." They may be social and have friends, but they tend to do the same things over and over again with the same small circle of people, rather than exposing themselves to new social situations.
. . Carducci points out, however, that shyness is not related to self-esteem. People can be confident in certain aspects of their lives—they may be able to give presentations in front of hundreds of people—but the thought of making small talk with a stranger might make them extremely anxious.
. . There are a number of approaches to a remedy:
. . Relaxation training. People might try imagining themselves in different social situations while taking slow, deep breaths to keep calm.
. . They can also work to slowly expand their comfort zone, Carducci said. He suggested volunteering as a good way to do this. "When you volunteer, [people] don't really care your level of skill; they're just after your time, so there's no critical self-evaluation", he explained.
. . It's also important to overcome shyness one step at a time, according to both psychologists. For instance, "if a shy man wants to ask a woman he sees at work out on a date, his first goal might be to have a brief conversation with her about some work-related topic", Cheek said.
. . Before doing so, he should practice the conversation with a friend or a counselor, Cheek said. Then the second time the shy guy speaks to the woman, he could talk about something a bit more personal, until eventually, he feels comfortable asking her out on a date.
. . People should also realize that "they need not take all the responsibility for any failure they might encounter", Cheek said. "Sometimes another person is unresponsive for reasons that have nothing to do with the shy person."
Aug 8, 07: Women who get cosmetic breast implants are nearly three times as likely to commit suicide as other women, U.S. researchers reported. The study reinforces several others that have shown women who have breast enlargements have higher suicide risks. "The increased risk of suicide was not apparent until 10 years after implantation", the researchers wrote.
. . Lipworth said she believes that some women who get implants may have psychiatric problems to start with, perhaps linked with lower self-esteem or body image disorders. Women with breast implants also had a tripled risk of death from alcohol and drug use.
. . They found no increase in the risk of death from cancer, including breast cancer. Women with implants were more likely to die from lung cancer and respiratory diseases, such as emphysema, but this is probably because they were more likely to smoke, the researchers said.
. . Last year, Canadian scientists also found a higher risk of suicide among women who got breast implants, although they had lower rates of other diseases, including cancer.
Aug 6, 07: Two studies showed the importance of a brain chemical in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, with researchers saying it might help explain why people with ADHD often are substance abusers.
Aug 6, 07: Preschoolers preferred the taste of burgers and fries when they came in McDonald's wrappers over the same food in plain wrapping, U.S. researchers said, suggesting fast-food marketing reaches the very young.
Aug 2, 07: Parents know that at about 18 months of age, toddlers start talking up a storm -- a vocabulary surge dubbed a "word spurt" --and some scientists have credited complex brain mechanisms.
. . But a simpler explanation may suffice. Using computer simulations and mathematical analysis, McMurray suggested that learning sufficient numbers of simple words paves the way for the seemingly sudden escalation in vocabulary.
. . Between birth and adulthood, children learn about 60,000 words on average, amounting to eight to 10 words a day, McMurray said. He said that as long as children are learning more than one word at a time and learning a greater number of difficult or moderate words than easy ones, his analysis showed that a vocabulary explosion will result.
Aug 1, 07: A team from London's Institute of Psychiatry found that suicide rates go up during hot weather. Analysis of more than 50,000 suicides in England and Wales between 1993 and 2003 showed the suicide rate rose when average daily temperatures topped 18C.
. . The researchers found that once the daily average temperature rose above 18C each further degree increase was associated with a rise in suicides of almost 4%. The rate in the rise of violent suicides was even higher, at 5% per degree rise in temperature.
. . She said it was possible that the effect was linked to levels of the mood controlling chemical serotonin in the brain, which have been shown to dip in the summer months. Alternatively, the suicide rate may be linked to the tendency to consume higher levels of alcohol in hot weather.
. . Three-quarters of all suicides were by men and this proportion remained constant over the study period. The highest daily suicide count was recorded for 1 January. The largest number of suicides took place on Mondays, with numbers declining as the week wore on.
July 31, 07: Scientists have genetically engineered mice that develop the physical and psychological characteristics of schizophrenia. They said the finding will help improve understanding of the disease and help develop drugs to treat it. Engineering animals to develop schizophrenia will help researchers better understand the disease, which affects about 1% of the world's population.
. . The rise of mollusks across the globe was a harbinger of doom roughly 250 million years ago, ushering in the most devastating mass extinction in Earth's history, research now reveals. This clammy conclusion suggests the disaster was long in coming, as opposed to the result of a more catastrophic extraterrestrial cause such as an planetisimal impact, scientists added.
. . The largest die-off in Earth's history was not the cataclysm that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. Instead, it was the so-called end-Permian mass extinction, which eliminated as much as 95% of the planet's species before even the earliest dinosaurs strode the planet.
. . One supposed consequence of this mass extinction was the dominance of oysters, snails and other mollusks all over the world. Now scientists studying mollusks fossils find they started rising to prominence some 8 million years before the end-Permian.
. . "Our results aren't really consistent with a more catastrophic extraterrestrial cause, such as an planetisimal impact—although they don't directly contradict the impact theory either." Instead, these findings support theories suggesting the end-Permian was triggered by ocean changes long in the making, "the climax of a prolonged environmental crisis."
July 31, 07: Ever whacked your thumb with a hammer, or wrenched your back after lifting a heavy box, and blamed the full moon? It's a popular notion, but there's no cosmic connection, Austrian government researchers said. Robert Seeberger, a physicist and astronomer at the Ministry of Economic Affairs, said a team of experts analyzed 500,000 industrial accidents in Austria between 2000 and 2004 and found no link to lunar activity.
July 29, 07: Weddings and other big events are the stuff of memories. Now researchers have found a genetic change that makes some people remember them better than others. The findings could help in the treatment of a number of psychiatric conditions, including post-trauma disorders.
. . Scientists have long recognized a link between memory and strong emotional events and the important evolutionary role it plays in remembering dangerous or favorable situations. But the mechanism that triggers or regulates these responses was unclear.
. . Most people remembered the emotional pictures better than the neutral ones, but there was a wide range in how well some people recalled the highly charged images, Papassotiropoulos, said. "There was a huge spectrum of this memory performance", he said. "The result was people with the deleted gene remembered emotional pictures better than people without the deletion."
. . The team also wanted to see what would happen to people carrying this genetic change who had very strong negative emotional memories. To do this, they interviewed a group of refugees from Rwanda's bloody civil war and found that survivors with the genetic change suffered more severe cases of post-traumatic stress syndrome.
. . This showed that the same genetic mutation that helps people remember how to avoid a dangerous situation or recall a happy experience could also worsen bad memories, the researchers said.
July 16, 07: Spite is a dark emotion that nonetheless seems to help set humanity apart from its closest primate relatives, new research suggests.
. . The sinister emotion that angrily dwells on how unfair the world is could shed light on the unusual human notion of fair play, and scientists say the research could help understand how and why these dark and light sides of human nature evolved.
. . One concept some researchers think is unique to humans is the idea of fairness -—that everyone should share the same advantages and disadvantages. To investigate whether chimpanzees believe in fairness, researchers examined how they responded to what humans might consider unfair situations.
. . First, chimps were put one at a time in cages that initially had access to food on a sliding table outside the cage. Each ape also had a rope that collapsed the table when pulled, crashing food onto the floor out of reach.
. . Unsurprisingly, the chimpanzees almost never collapsed the table while they themselves ate. However, when a second chimp in a different cage stole food from the first by sliding the table out of reach, the first collapsed the table 50% of the time. This suggests chimpanzees are vengeful -—that is, they vindictively retaliate against others who deliberately profited at their expense. "It's extraordinary how angry the chimps would get when food was stolen from them—they just became exploding black balls of rage", said evolutionary biologist Keith Jensen.
. . On the other hand, when chimpanzees could see food on the table but were barred from eating, they apparently did not choose to collapse the table just because they saw other apes dining from it. This suggests chimps are not spiteful—they will not punish others simply for blamelessly having benefits that they do not. "The fact that humans are sensitive to fairness has a dark side, but also a good side."
. . An angry chimpanzee will take revenge but --unlike a human-- it will not do so out of spite. The study showed chimpanzees would seek retribution when wronged but did not punish others out of spite.
. . The study suggests that anger is an important motivational force but what causes it differs greatly between chimpanzees and humans. "Humans and apes both get upset at theft but humans are more likely to get upset at unfairness."
July 12, 07: Two people are sitting in a room together: an experimenter and a subject. The experimenter gets up and closes the door, and the room becomes quieter. The subject is likely to believe that the experimenter's purpose in closing the door was to make the room quieter.
. . This is an example of correspondent inference theory. People tend to infer the motives --and also the disposition-- of someone who performs an action based on the effects of his actions, and not on external or situational factors. Edward Jones and Keith Davis advanced this theory in the 1960s and 1970s. Cognitive biases aren’t bad; they’re sensible rules of thumb.
July 12, 07: Researchers have confirmed what common wisdom has long held --that people can suppress emotionally troubling memories-- and said they have sketched out how the brain accomplishes this.
. . They said their findings might lead to a way to help patients with post-traumatic stress disorder or anxiety to gain control of debilitating memories. "You're shutting down parts of the brain that are responsible for supporting memories", said Brendan Depue, a neuroscience doctoral student at the U of Colorado who worked on the study. He said his team discovered the brain's emotional center is also shut down.
. . "It might be the case that people with memory disturbances have to gain some control over the memory representation by remembering it (and) trying a different emotional response to the memory before successful suppression", Depue said. A drug targeting specific brain regions might eventually boost the ability to suppress memory.
July 11, 07: Men might throw their weight around at the office, but at home, women are the bosses. A study, which was just released, finds that wives have more power than their husbands in making decisions and dominating discussions. "The study at least suggests that the marriage is a place where women can exert some power", said lead author David Vogel, a psychologist at Iowa State U. "Whether or not it's because of changing societal roles, we don't know.” The results counter past research.
. . The women were not just talking more than their husbands. "It wasn't just that the women were bringing up issues that weren't being responded to, but that the men were actually going along with what they said”, Vogel explained. “[Women] were communicating more powerful messages, and men were responding to those messages by agreeing or giving in. Women are responsible for overseeing the relationship, making sure the relationship runs, that everything gets done, and that everybody's happy", Murphy said.
. . Wife power could signal a harmonious couple. "There's been research that suggests that's a marker of a healthy marriage -—that men accept influence from their wives", Murphy said.
July 10, 07: A new psychology study at Washington U was no laughing matter: It found that older adults may have a harder time getting jokes because of an age-related decline in certain memory and reasoning abilities.
. . The research suggested that because older adults may have greater difficulty with cognitive flexibility, abstract reasoning and short-term memory, they also have greater difficulty with tests of humor comprehension. The younger adults did 6% better on the verbal jokes and 14% better on the comic portion than did older participants.
July 3, 07: Babies learn to lie when they're six months old, earlier than previously believed --and these tender deceptions are practice for later, more complicated duplicity. That's the conclusion of U of Portsmouth psychologists who, based on parent interviews and studies of 50 children, say they've identified an unexpectedly rich culture of infant fibbing.
. . Long before children can understand complex ideas about truth and deception, Dr. Reddy writes in the April issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, "they are engaging in subtle manipulations of their own and others' actions, which succeed in deceiving others at least temporarily."
. . The Telegraph added: Infants quickly learnt that using tactics such as fake crying and pretend laughing could win them attention. By eight months, more difficult deceptions became apparent, such as concealing forbidden activities or trying to distract parents' attention.
. . The researchers say that fake crying, used to get attention though nothing is wrong, is a first step on the slippery slope to deception. The dishonesty, said lead investigator Vasudevi Reddy, can be detected when babies pause to see if they've been heard -- showing that they're "clearly able to distinguish that what they are doing will have an effect."
July 3, 07: Researchers at Harvard and McGill U (in Montreal) are working on an amnesia drug that blocks or deletes bad memories. The technique seems to allow psychiatrists to disrupt the biochemical pathways that allow a memory to be recalled.
. . In a new study, propranolol is used along with therapy to "dampen" memories of trauma victims. They treated 19 accident or rape victims for ten days, during which the patients were asked to describe their memories of the traumatic event that had happened 10 years earlier. Some patients were given the drug, which is also used to treat amnesia, while others were given a placebo.
. . A week later, they found that patients given the drug showed fewer signs of stress when recalling their trauma.
Jun 29, 07: Exercise stimulates the growth of new brain cells, a new study on rats finds. The new cells could be the key to why working out relieves depression. Previous research showed physical exercise can have antidepressant effects, but until now scientists didn’t fully understand how it worked.
. . Astrid Bjornebekk of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and her colleagues studied rats that had been genetically tweaked to show depressive behaviors, plus a second group of control rats. For 30 days, some of the rats had free access to running wheels and others did not.
. . Then, to figure out if running turned the down-and-out rats into happy campers, the scientists used a standard “swim test”. They measured the amount of time the rats spent immobile in the water and the time they spent swimming around in active mode. When depressed, rats spend most of the time not moving.
. . “The hippocampus formation is one of the regions they have actually seen structural changes in depressed patients”, Bjornebekk said. Running had a similar effect as common antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) on lifting depression.
Jun 20, 07: [How does this make you feel?] Putting feelings into words makes sadness and anger less intense, U.S. brain researchers said, in a finding that explains why talking to a therapist --or even a sympathetic bartender-- often makes people feel better. They said talking about negative feelings activates a part of the brain responsible for impulse control. "This region of the brain seems to be involved in putting on the brakes."
. . What they found is that when people attached a word like angry to an angry-looking face, the response in the amygdala portion of the brain that handles fear, panic and other strong emotions decreased.
. . What lights up instead is the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, part of the brain that controls impulses. The same region of the brain has been found in prior studies to play a role in motor control.
. . "What we see is something that at first blush is far more trivial. By simply putting the name to an emotion, the person doesn't feel like they've come to any new insight. And yet we see this dampening response anyway."
Jun 13, 07: The type of man who makes woman’s heart flutter has a lot to whether she was a daddy’s girl, according to a new study. Women who got along well with their dads as kids are attracted to men who resemble their fathers, whereas women who had a bad father-daughter relationship do not.
Jun 12, 07: With more than a billion people now sharing just 100 surnames, Chinese authorities are considering a landmark move to try to end the confusion, state media reported.
Jun 7, 07: Most people have had deja vu --that eerie sense of having experienced something before-- but U.S. researchers have identified the part of the brain responsible for this sensation, and they think it may lead to new treatments for memory-related problems.
. . They said neurons in a memory center of the brain called the hippocampus make a mental map of new places and experiences, then store them away for future use. But when two experiences begin to seem very much alike, these mental maps overlap and start to blur. It is really just a malfunction in the brain's ability to sort through new information, something called episodic memory.
Jun 2, 07: People who are looking to ease depression may have a new treatment option --marriage. A recent study suggests that marriage provides a greater psychological boost to depressed people than to happy people, even if the marriage is so-so.
. . Previous studies have suggested that the psychological perks of marriage depend upon marriage quality --a happy marriage gives rise to a happy couple, and vice versa. Other studies have shown that depressed people, who tend to communicate poorly and require more caring and support than happy people, also end up in unhappier marriages. They speculated that happy people would garner more psychological perks from marriage than depressed people.
. . To test their theory, they looked at a sample of 3,066 men and women who had been interviewed and tested for depression once in either 1987 or 1988 and then again five years later. In the interviews, they were asked about the quality of their marriage (if they were married).
. . On average, controlling for differences in depression, subjects who had gotten married over the five-year span between the two interviews reported improved psychological well-being in the second interview --scoring an average of 3.42 points lower on the 84-point depression scale-- than their counterparts who did not marry.
. . When they teased apart how marriage affected those who had been depressed at the start of the study to those who had been happy, however, they came across something unexpected. The depressed who married scored an average of 7.56 points lower on the depression scale than the depressed who did not marry, while those who were happy and got married scored only 1.87 points lower on the scale. In other words, marriage provided a much bigger psychological boost to the depressed subjects than to the happy subjects.
May 27, 07: Soon after birth, infants are keen and sophisticated generalists, capable of seeing details in the world that are visible to some other animals but invisible to adults, older children and even slightly older infants. Recently, scientists have learned the following:
. . * At a few days old, infants can pick out their native tongue from a foreign one.
. . * At 4 or 5 months, infants can lip read, matching faces on silent videos to "ee" and "ah" sounds.
. . * Infants can recognize the consonants and vowels of all languages on Earth, and they can hear the difference between foreign language sounds that elude most adults.
. . * Infants in their first six months can tell the difference between two monkey faces that an older person would say are identical, and they can match calls that monkeys make with pictures of their faces.
. . * Infants are rhythm experts, capable of differentiating between the beats of their culture and another.
May 23, 07: A quick look at the lengths of children's index and ring fingers can be used to predict how well students will perform on SATs, new research claims.
. . Kids with longer ring fingers compared to index fingers are likely to have higher math scores than literacy or verbal scores on the college entrance exam, while children with the reverse finger-length ratio are likely to have higher reading and writing, or verbal, scores versus math scores.
. . Scientists have known that different levels of the hormones testosterone and estrogen in the womb account for the different finger lengths, which are a reflection of areas of the brain that are more highly developed than others.
. . Exposure to testosterone in the womb is said to promote development of areas of the brain often associated with spatial and mathematical skills, he said. That hormone makes the ring finger longer. Estrogen exposure does the same for areas of the brain associated with verbal ability and tends to lengthen the index finger relative to the ring finger.
. . In the future, his team will see if finger-length ratios are related to other cognitive and behavioral issues, such as technophobia, career paths and possibly dyslexia.
May, 07: The Virginia Tech massacre is precisely the sort of event we humans tend to overreact to. Our brains aren't very good at probability and risk analysis, especially when it comes to rare occurrences. We tend to exaggerate spectacular, strange and rare events, and downplay ordinary, familiar and common ones. There's a lot of research in the psychological community about how the brain responds to risk.
. . But the gist is this: Our brains are much better at processing the simple risks we've had to deal with throughout most of our species' existence, and much poorer at evaluating the complex risks society forces us face today.
. . Novelty plus dread equals overreaction.
. . Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft gave a speech in Minnesota in 2003, claiming that the fact there were no new terrorist attacks since 9/11 was proof that his policies were working. I thought: "There were no terrorist attacks in the two years preceding 9/11, and you didn't have any policies. What does that prove?"
. . Consider the reaction to a recent event: professional baseball player Josh Hancock got drunk and died in a car crash. As a result, several baseball teams are banning alcohol in their clubhouses after games. Aside from this being a ridiculous reaction to an incredibly rare event (2,430 baseball games per season, 35 people per clubhouse, two clubhouses per game. And how often has this happened?), it makes no sense as a solution. Hancock didn't get drunk in the clubhouse; he got drunk at a bar. But Major League Baseball needs to be seen as doing something, even if that something doesn't make sense --even if that something actually increases risk by forcing players to drink at bars instead of at the clubhouse, where there's more control over the practice.
. . I tell people that if it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of "news" is "something that hardly ever happens." It's when something isn't in the news, when it's so common that it's no longer news --car crashes, domestic violence-- that you should start worrying.
. . But that's not the way we think. Psychologist Scott Plous said it well in The Psychology of Judgment and Decision Making: "In very general terms: (1) The more available an event is, the more frequent or probable it will seem; (2) the more vivid a piece of information is, the more easily recalled and convincing it will be; and (3) the more salient something is, the more likely it will be to appear causal."
. . So, when faced with a very available and highly vivid event like 9/11 or the Virginia Tech shootings, we overreact. And when faced with all the salient related events, we assume causality. We pass the Patriot Act. We think if we give guns out to students, or maybe make it harder for students to get guns, we'll have solved the problem. We don't let our children go to playgrounds unsupervised. We stay out of the ocean because we read about a shark attack somewhere.
. . It's our brains again. We need to "do something", even if that something doesn't make sense; even if it is ineffective.
. . Lastly, our brains need to find someone or something to blame. (Jon Stewart has an excellent bit on the Virginia Tech scapegoat search, and media coverage in general.) But sometimes there is no scapegoat to be found; sometimes we did everything right, but just got unlucky. We simply can't prevent a lone nutcase from shooting people at random; there's no security measure that would work.
. . As circular as it sounds, rare events are rare primarily because they don't occur very often, and not because of any preventive security measures. And implementing security measures to make these rare events even rarer is like the joke about the guy who stomps around his house to keep the elephants away.
. . "Elephants? There are no elephants in this neighborhood", says a neighbor.
. . "See how well it works!"
. . If you want to do something that makes security sense, figure out what's common among a bunch of rare events, and concentrate your countermeasures there. Focus on the general risk of terrorism, and not the specific threat of airplane bombings using liquid explosives. Focus on the general risk of troubled young adults, and not the specific threat of a lone gunman wandering around a college campus. Ignore the movie-plot threats, and concentrate on the real risks.
. . Bruce Schneier is the CTO of BT Counterpane and the author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World.
May 21, 07: Hyperactive behavior and difficulty in school share the same genetic roots, conclude the authors of a new study of twins. The findings call into question the assumption that hyperactive kids do poorly in school due to lack of effort, as well as the idea that hyperactivity arises from frustration with difficulties in school, said Dr. Kimberly J. Saudino of Boston U.
May 14, 07: French workers are the world's biggest whiners, according to a study. The Irish complain least about their lot.
May 8, 07: A recent study at the U of Minnesota suggests that ceiling height affects problem-solving skills and behavior by priming concepts that encourage certain kinds of brain processing.
. . "Priming means a concept gets activated in a person's head", researcher Joan Meyers-Levy said. "When people are in a room with a high ceiling, they activate the idea of freedom. In a low-ceilinged room, they activate more constrained, confined concepts." The labeling for their somewhat abstract concepts, "freedom" and "confinement", comes from a speculative paper on how lofty cathedral ceilings might encourage a different religious experience from the low ceilings of a modest chapel.
. . "Managers should want noticeably higher ceilings for thinking of bold initiatives. The technicians and accountants might want low ceilings."
May 7, 07: About two-thirds of U.S. children will go through a traumatic event in their childhood but few are likely to experience post-traumatic stress disorder, U.S. researchers said.
Apr 24, 07: Intelligence has nothing to do with wealth, according to a US study which found that people with below average smarts were just as wealthy as those with higher IQ scores. The study confirmed previous research which has shown that smarter people tend to earn more money, but pointed out there is a difference between high pay and overall wealth.
. . "The average income difference between a person with an IQ score in the normal range (100) and someone in the top two percent of society (130) is currently between 6,000 and 18,500 dollars per year", it said. "But when it came to total wealth and the likelihood of financial difficulties, people of below average and average intelligence did just fine when compared to the super-intelligent."
. . An irregular pattern of total wealth as well as financial distress levels --such as maxed out credit cards, bankruptcy and missing bill payments-- emerged among the various degrees of intelligence, the study said.
Apr 16, 07: British researchers said they were stunned to discover that people get more of a buzz from eating chocolate than passionately kissing their lovers.
. . "These results really surprised and intrigued us", said psychologist David Lewis, who led a study that recorded brain activity and heart rate from volunteers who tasted pieces of dark chocolate or kissed their partners. "There is no doubt that chocolate beats kissing hands down when it comes to providing a long-lasting body and brain buzz --a buzz that, in many cases, lasted four times as long as the most passionate kiss."
. . While researchers expected chocolate, especially dark chocolate, to raise heart rates, he said, "both the length of this increase together with the powerful effects it had on the mind were something none of us had anticipated."
. . The study found that --at the point chocolate melts in the mouth-- all areas of the brain are stimulated far more intensely and for longer than from from kissing. Chocolate also made the heart beat faster, according to the study supervised by Lewis, a formerly University of Sussex psychologist.
. . Some people saw the number of heart beats per minute rise from a resting rate of about 60 to as high as 140. Kissing also made the couples' hearts pound, but not for as long. Both sexes showed the same responses in the tests.
Apr 11, 07: Robin Hood lives! People taking part in a game designed to explore egalitarian impulses in human nature consistently robbed from players assigned the most money while giving money to those with the least, scientists said. "In essence, what we found is that our taste for equality is one of the important reasons why we cooperate with each other, much more so than, say, other species of primates", Fowler said.
. . About 70% of participants at some point reduced or added to another person's money, most often by taking from the richest players or by donating to the poorest players, the study found. These actions had the collective effect of equalizing income among the players --with participants spending their own money to achieve the goal.
. . The researchers said even players whose own loot had been pilfered in previous rounds were willing to take steps to redistribute the money in an egalitarian manner. "I think in general we would find a preference for equality, but there may be significant variations between societies. And so it's certainly a possibility that our desire for equality is in part shaped by our upbringing", Fowler said.
Apr 10, 07: Suicide rates among people of all ages are higher in states where more homes have guns, U.S. researchers reported.
. . Twice as many people committed suicide in the 15 states with the highest levels of household gun ownership, compared with the six states with the lowest levels, even though the population in all the states was about the same
. . While just 5% of all suicide attempts involve a gun, the person succeeds in killing himself or herself 90% of the time. People use drugs to attempt suicide in 75% of cases, but actually die less than 3% of the time, the researchers said.
. . "In a nation where more than half of all suicides are gun suicides and where more than one in three homes have firearms, one cannot talk about suicide without talking about guns", Miller said. The same team found in February that guns are used to kill two out of every three murder victims in the US.
Mar 22, 07: The human brain is a fascinating organ, but it's an absolute mess. Because it has evolved over millions of years, there are all sorts of processes jumbled together rather than logically organized. Some of the processes are optimized for only certain kinds of situations, while others don't work as well as they could. There's some duplication of effort, and even some conflicting brain processes.
. . Assessing and reacting to risk is one of the most important things a living creature has to deal with, and there's a very primitive part of the brain that has that job. It's the amygdala, and it sits right above the brainstem, in what's called the medial temporal lobe. The amygdala is responsible for processing base emotions that come from sensory inputs, like anger, avoidance, defensiveness and fear. It's an old part of the brain, and seems to have originated in early fishes.
. . When an animal --lizard, bird, mammal, even you-- sees, hears or feels something that's a potential danger, the amygdala is what reacts immediately. It's what causes adrenaline and other hormones to be pumped into your bloodstream, triggering the fight-or-flight response, causing increased heart rate and beat force, increased muscle tension and sweaty palms. Fast reaction is what you're looking for; the faster you can notice threats and either run away from them or fight back, the more likely you are to live to reproduce.
. . But the world is actually more complicated than that. Some scary things are not really as risky as they seem, and others are better handled by staying in the scary situation to set up a more advantageous future response. This means there's an evolutionary advantage to being able to hold off the reflexive fight-or-flight response while you work out a more sophisticated analysis of the situation and your options for handling it.
. . We humans have a completely different pathway to cope with analyzing risk. It's the neocortex, a more advanced part of the brain that developed very recently, evolutionarily speaking, and only appears in mammals. It's intelligent and analytic. It can reason. It can make more nuanced trade-offs. It's also much slower.
. . So here's the first fundamental problem: We have two systems for reacting to risk --a primitive intuitive system and a more advanced analytic system-- and they're operating in parallel. It's hard for the neocortex to contradict the amygdala.
. . It's really no different than your body developing antibodies against, say, chicken pox, based on a single exposure. In both cases, your body is saying: "This happened once, and therefore it's likely to happen again. And when it does, I'll be ready." It's harder for the brain to deal with a multitude of lifelong fears.
. . Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain's most stunning innovations, and we wouldn't have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development --still in beta testing.
. . Professor Colquhoun, of U College London's department of pharmacology, cited the example of homeopathy. He said it had barely changed since the start of the 19th Century and was "more like religion than science". He also pointed out that some supporters of nutritional therapy have been known to claim that changes in diet can cure Aids.
. . He said the teaching of complementary medicine under a science banner was worse than "Mickey Mouse" degrees in golf management and baking that have sprung up in recent years as "they do what it says on the label. That is quite different from awarding BSc degrees in subjects that are not science at all, but are positively anti-science. Yet this sort of gobbledygook is being taught in some UK universities as though it were science."
. . He suggested it would be better if courses in aromatherapy, acupuncture, herbal medicine, reflexology, naturopathy and traditional Chinese medicine were taught as part of a cultural history or sociological course.
Mar 21, 07: It's wartime, and an enemy doctor is conducting painful and inevitably fatal experiments on children. You have two kids, ages 8 and 5. You can surrender one of them within 24 hours or the doctor will kill both. What is the right thing to do?
. . For most people, this scenario based on one in William Styron's novel "Sophie's Choice" is almost an impossible dilemma. But for a group of people with damage in a part of the brain's frontal lobe that helps govern emotions, the decision was far more clear. They would choose one child for death.
. . Scientists said a study involving these people has produced unique insights into the brain mechanics of moral decision making and showed that in some key situations emotions play a fundamental role in moral judgments.
. . The new findings highlighted the role of a region in the front part of the brain below the eyes called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Earlier research had pegged this area --one of the more recently evolved parts of the human brain-- as playing a role in generating social emotions. In fact, the people with damage in this region due to stroke or other causes experienced severely diminished empathy, compassion and sense of guilt.
. . The study involved six people with damage in this brain region who were presented with 50 scenarios requiring moral judgments, some trivial and some difficult. Their responses were compared to those of 12 others with damage to an unrelated part of the brain and 12 more with no brain damage.
. . Another wartime scenario involved enemy troops searching for civilians to kill. The people in the study were asked about their willingness to kill their own infant whose crying was drawing the attention of enemy soldiers who would then kill the parent, the baby and people hiding with them. Again, the people with this brain damage were far more willing to judge killing the baby as the right moral choice.
. . The scenarios weighed immediate harm or death to one person against certain future harm or death to many. These brain-damaged people regularly showed a willingness to bring harm to an individual, an act others may find repugnant.
Mar 14, 07: One socially crushing moment --think schoolyard bullies-- can challenge the survival of new nerve cells in the brain and may even lead to depression, U.S. researchers said.
. . In a study of young rats threatened by aggressive, older rats, the bullied ones were able to generate new nerve cells in key memory and emotion regions of the brain but most of those cells later died. The research suggests that stress kills young nerve cells, a finding that might lead to potential interventions.
Mar 11, 07: Researchers reported that a hormone produced by the body in response to stress that normally serves to calm adults and younger children instead increases anxiety in adolescents.
. . They conducted experiments with female mice focusing on the hormone THP that demonstrated this paradoxical effect, and described the brain mechanism that explains it. If, as the scientists suspect, the same thing happens in people, the phenomenon may help account for the mood swings and anxiety exhibited by many adolescents. "Responses to stressful events are amplified, and anxiety and panic disorder first emerge at this time, being twice as likely to occur in girls as in boys. In addition, suicide risk increases in adolescence, despite the use of adult-based medical strategies."
. . THP, also called allopregnanolone, generally serves as a natural tranquilizer. It is not produced immediately with stress, but rather several minutes later, and calms neural activity to reduce anxiety and assist the individual in adapting and functioning amid stress.
Mar 9, 07: The brain does register subliminal images even if a person is unaware they have seen them, UK researchers report. The research suggests subliminal advertising is probably effective. The practice, which was first used in the 1950s, has been banned in the UK, but is still permitted in the US.
. . Using brain scans, a team from University College, London, showed people only registered the images if the brain had "spare capacity". This is the first time researchers have provided physiological evidence of the impact.
. . Using functional MRI brain scanning, the researchers found that during the easy task the brain registered the 'invisible' object although the participants were unaware they had seen it. But during the harder task, which required more concentration, the fMRI scan did not pick up any relevant brain activity suggesting the participants had not registered the subliminal image.
Mar 6, 07: The French Constitutional Council has approved a law that criminalizes the filming or broadcasting of acts of violence by people other than professional journalists. The law could lead to the imprisonment of eyewitnesses who film acts of police violence, or operators of Web sites publishing the images, one French civil liberties group warned.
. . The council chose an unfortunate anniversary to publish its decision approving the law, which came exactly 16 years after Los Angeles police officers beating Rodney King were filmed.
Mar 6, 07: In a major victory for right-to-die advocates in Roman Catholic Italy, prosecutors cleared a doctor of wrongdoing after he switched off the life support of a terminally ill patient who had asked to die.
People with schizophrenia cannot hear false notes in music as well as healthy people do, and often cannot make out important tones that convey meaning in speech, U.S. researchers reported. "We show they are not experiencing the world normally. They don't read social cues. They can't read facial expressions. They can't tell by tone of voice what emotion a person is showing."
. . Their tests on 19 adults with schizophrenia and 19 similar people without the condition showed clear differences, both when assessed using quizzes and looking inside the brain using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI.
. . "They can't use pitch --they just don't hear those pitch changes. Not only do they not get emotion, they don't get whether it is a question or a statement. And what we show in the paper is that these sensory abnormalities are driven by structures in the brain, in the connections between the brain stem and the auditory cortex", Javitt said. "If we could detect it early and start remediating and start having patients practice, we could hopefully preserve and restore these pathways."
. . Javitt wants to find out if there is data on whether professional musicians might be protected from schizophrenia, and would like to see if musical training might be protective. Another important study would be to see how schizophrenia affects people who speak languages in which tone is even more important than it is in English, such as Chinese or Vietnamese.
Feb 22, 07: Memories of traumatic events are not suppressed by the people who experienced them but can be recalled clearly, according to Canadian researchers.
. . Sigmund Freud developed a theory that victims of horrific events repressed difficult memories in order to cope with what happened to them. But scientists at Dalhousie U in Halifax found in a five-year study that pleasant events were more difficult to recall than unhappy ones. "We were frankly blown away."
. . Porter and his team re-interviewed them after three months and again after four to five years. Based on a questionnaire with a maximum possible score of 36, the average mark among participants for consistently recalling a traumatic experience was 30, compared to 15 for a positive one. "It really makes good sense to remember the event well in the future so we can avoid those circumstances and maximize our chances of survival."
Feb 9, 07: Missing out on sleep may cause the brain to stop producing new cells, a study has suggested. The work on rats, by a team from Princeton University found a lack of sleep affected the hippocampus, a brain region involved in forming memories. The research showed a stress hormone causes the effect. A UK expert said it would be interesting to see if too little rather than no sleep had the same consequence.
. . They found those who missed out on rest had higher levels of the stress hormone corticosterone. They also produced significantly fewer new brain cells in a particular region of the hippocampus. When the animals' corticosterone levels were kept at a constant level, the reduction in cell proliferation was abolished.
Feb 8, 07: A fleeting pulse of light has been captured and then made to reappear in a different location by US physicists. The quantum sleight of hand exploits the properties of super-cooled matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate. The work could one day lead to advances in computing and optical communication.
. . Instead of just one cloud of sodium atoms, the new setup used two, a fraction of a millimeter apart. A pulse of light was shone on the first cloud, impressing a "cast" of the pulse into a clump of spinning sodium atoms, nudged in the direction of the second condensate. This slowly-moving clump was composed entirely of sodium atoms, effectively turning light into matter. Once the "messenger" group had merged with the second cloud, a second laser was shone through the condensate to revive the original pulse of light. From a standing start, the reconstructed beam sped back up to the normal speed of light. The emerging pulse was slightly weaker than the high-speed beam that entered the experimental setup, but was identical in all other respects.
Feb 5, 07: [This is interesting, pch'ly. How did his identity change so much, so fast. Did he chose his first religion? Better Q: is he *really chosing now?] A Malaysian Muslim man switched at birth in a hospital mix-up wants to change his name after being reunited with his ethnic-Chinese biological family and become a Buddhist. Whether Muslims can convert to another faith is a tricky legal question in Malaysia, where Islam is the official religion, although freedom of worship is a constitutional right. Ethnic Malays are deemed to be Muslim from birth, but the country's highest civil court has yet to rule on whether they have the right to convert to another religion.
Jan 21, 07: Altruism, one of the most difficult human behaviors to define, can be detected in brain scans, U.S. researchers reported. They found activity in a specific area of the brain could predict altruistic behavior --and people's own reports of how selfish or giving they are.
. . The researchers were surprised by their findings. Some other studies had predicted that giving would activate the reward systems in the brain. In fact, another center was activated when the students either won money for charity, or watched the computer win money for charity. "This area we saw was the posterior superior temporal cortex", Huettel said. "It's part of the parietal lobe. What this brain area seems to be involved in is extracting meaning from things you see."
. . His team asked the students how altruistic they were, and found the test strongly correlated with their own reports of unselfish activity, such as helping a stranger or comforting a friend.
Jan 16, 07: Winning the Nobel Prize quite literally gives scientists a new lease of life. New research at the University of Warwick in central England shows that scientists who have won the prize for their work in chemistry and physics not only get cash and kudos but they live two years longer than colleagues who have only been nominated.
. . Winners lived on average 1.4 years longer than nominees. The gap widened another two-thirds of a year when winners and losers from the same country were compared. Oswald said the amount of prize money did not have an impact on lifespan, nor did being nominated more than once.
Jan 11, 07: American states where more people own guns have higher murder rates, including murders of children, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health reported. The study, certain to provoke arguments in a country where gun ownership is an important political issue, found that about one in three U.S. households reported firearm ownership.
. . "Our findings suggest that in the United States, household firearms may be an important source of guns used to kill children, women and men, both on the street and in their homes", said Matthew Miller, assistant professor of health policy and injury prevention, who led the study. His team used data from a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey of 200,000 people in all 50 states.
. . In states with the most guns, firearm homicide rates were 114% higher. More than 200 million guns are privately owned in the United States, according to the Justice Department.
Jan 10, 07: Family gatherings often turn into chaos when kids erupt into earsplitting spats. Now scientists have found some underlying reasons for sibling fights and ways to bring calm back to the household.
. . . . Among the new findings:
. . * When fathers say they are less in love in their marriages, their children are closer with siblings.
. . * Sisters feel closer to their siblings than do brothers, and relationships between brothers and sisters gets closer in later adolescence.
. . * Rather than encouraging kids to forget past quarrels, it might be better if parents use the conflicts to help children learn conflict resolution skills.
. . * Children can reach after-the-fact compromises to resolve long-standing conflicts.
Sisters showed closer ties with siblings than brothers did, and for both genders, discord peaked when the first-born was 13 and the second-born about 10 years old. When mothers reported warm relations with children, the siblings also reported intimacy with a sister or brother.
. . The researchers also found that as a father’s intimacy with his wife declined, siblings were closer with one another. When a father reported positive feelings about his marriage and wife, sibling intimacy took a dive. Rocky relations between parents could lead siblings to turn to one another for support.
Jan 5, 07: Boosting intelligence among the poor is child's play: Giving pre-school children toys to play with boosts their mental development even if they suffer from malnutrition, a report said. Giving pre-school children toys to play with boosts their mental development even if they suffer from malnutrition.
. . "We have done play programs in Bangladesh where the children are severely malnourished and we have produced up to a nine-point improvement in the IQ of these kids --just with play", said author Sally McGregor.
. . The report found that more than 200 million of the world's poorest children were underfed and under-stimulated. It said 89 million of the most neglected children lived in south Asia, while 145 million were divided among India, Nigeria, China, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Tanzania.
. . Simple intervention at the lowest level by governments and aid agencies to change attitudes and encourage pre-school play at home, as well as basic nutrition, could have a major effect, researchers concluded. "People are focused on reducing mortality. But they haven't realized that so many children are not reaching their potential", said McGregor. "But by the time they reach five or six and go to school their chances are almost blown."
Jan 2, 07: Brain scans have given US scientists a clue about how we create a mental image of our own future. The Washington Uteam say that specific areas of the brain are active when thinking about upcoming events.
. . The study could help doctors trying to understand damage inflicted by strokes, injuries or diseases. The findings tally with damage spotted in the brains of patients who have lost the ability to 'think ahead'. The test results are in line with other studies of patients who have suffered brain damage in roughly the same areas, and are no longer able to imagine future events.
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