Pedophiles Have Deficits In Brain Activation, Study Suggests

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070920091209.htm

Science Daily — Pedophilia, the sexual attraction of adults to children, is a significant public health concern and it does not respond well to treatment. Additionally, the brain mechanisms underlying pedophilia are not well understood.
A new study being published in the September 15th issue of Biological Psychiatry is the first of its kind to use functional brain imaging to describe neural circuits contributing to pedophilia.
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, Walter and colleagues report that pedophilic patients showed reduced activation of the hypothalamus, a brain region involved in regulating physiologic arousal and hormone release, as compared to healthy individuals when they were viewing sexually arousing pictures of adults.
Deficits of activation in the frontal cortex were associated with the extent of pedophilic behavior. In other words, when shown erotic pictures of adults, the brains of the pedophilic patients had reduced reactions in the pleasure center of the brain, indicating an altered sexual interest.
John H. Krystal, M.D., Editor of Biological Psychiatry and affiliated with both Yale University School of Medicine and the VA Connecticut Healthcare System, comments that, "the ability to intervene rationally in this disorder is limited by shortcomings in our understanding of its neurobiology. The findings provide clues to the complexity of this disorder, [and] this deficit may predispose individuals who are vulnerable to pedophilia to seek other forms of stimulation." It is important to acknowledge and consider however, that it is currently unknown "whether this pattern of brain activation is a risk factor for the development of pedophilia or a consequence of their pedophilic sexual experiences," according to Dr. Krystal, and future research will be needed.
One of the study's authors, Georg Northoff, M.D., Ph.D., adds, "[These findings] may open the door for better understanding the neurobiology of this disorder which is of forensic, criminal and public concern. Our results may thus be seen as the first step towards establishing a neurobiology of pedophilia which ultimately may contribute to the development of new and effective means of therapies for this debilitating disorder."
The article is "Pedophilia Is Linked to Reduced Activation in Hypothalamus and Lateral Prefrontal Cortex During Visual Erotic Stimulation" by Martin Walter, Joachim Witzel, Christine Wiebking, Udo Gubka, Michael Rotte, Kolja Schiltz, Felix Bermpohl, Claus Tempelmann, Bernhard Bogerts, Hans Jochen Heinze, and Georg Northoff. Drs. Walter, Wiebking, Schiltz, Bogerts and Northoff are with the Department of Psychiatry, Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg, Germany, while Drs. Rotte, Tempelmann, and Heinze are with the Department of Neurology. Drs. Witzel and Gubka are affiliated with the State Hospital for Forensic Psychiatry of Saxonia Anhaltina, Germany. Dr. Bermpohl is with the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at Charité Medical School, University Medicine Berlin, Germany. The article appears in Biological Psychiatry, Volume 62, Issue 6 (September 15, 2007), published by Elsevier.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Elsevier.

Fausto Intilla
www.oloscience.com

Brain Center For 'Sound Space' Identified

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070919121602.htm

Science Daily — While the visual regions of the brain have been intensively mapped, many important regions for auditory processing remain terra incognita. Now, researchers have identified the region responsible for a key auditory process--perceiving "sound space," the location of sounds.

The findings settle a controversy in earlier studies that failed to establish the auditory region, called the planum temporale, as responsible for perceiving auditory space. Leon Y. Deouell and colleagues published their findings in the journal Neuron.
Studies by other researchers had shown that the planum temporale was activated when people were asked to perform tasks in which they located sounds in space. However, many researchers believed that the region was responsible only for intentional processing of such information. And in fact, previous studies had failed to establish that the planum temporale was responsible for automatic, nonintentional representation of spatial location.
However, Deouell and colleagues used an improved experimental design that enabled them to more sensitively determine the brain's auditory spatial location center. For example, they presented their human subjects with sounds against a background of silence, used headphones that more accurately reproduced sound location, used noise with a rich spectrum which has been shown to be more readily locatable in space, and created an individually tailored sound space for each subject by using sounds previously recorded directly from the subjects' own ears.
In their experiments, they presented bursts of the noise to the volunteers wearing the headphones while the subjects' brains were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging. In this widely used brain-scanning technique, harmless magnetic fields and radio waves are used to image blood flow in brain regions, which reflects brain activity in those locations.
The subjects were instructed to ignore the sounds. And, to divert their attention, they either watched a movie with the sound turned off or were given a simple button-pushing task.
When the position of the noise bursts was varied in space, the researchers found that the planum temporale in the subjects' brain was, indeed, activated. What's more, the greater the number of distinct sound locations subjects heard during test runs, the greater the activity in the planum temporale.
The researchers concluded that their experiments "suggest that neurons in this region represent, in a nonintentional or preattentive fashion, the location of sound sources in the environment." They wrote that "Space representation in this region may provide the neural substrate needed for an orientation response to critical auditory events and for linking auditory information with information acquired through other modalities."
The researchers include Leon Y. Deouell of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and University of California at Berkeley; Aaron S. Heller of University of California at Berkeley; Rafael Malach of Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot; and Mark D'Esposito and Robert T. Knight of University of California at Berkeley.
This work was supported by NINDS Grant NS21135 to R.T.K. and an Israel Science Foundation grant 477-05 to L.Y.D.
Reference: Deouell et al.: "Cerebral Responses to Change in Spatial Location of Unattended Sounds." Publishing in Neuron 55, 985--996, September 20, 2007. DOI 10.1016/j.neuron.2007.08.019.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Cell Press.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

Brain Network Related To Intelligence Identified

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070911092117.htm

Science Daily — A primary mystery puzzling neuroscientists – where in the brain lies intelligence? – just may have a unified answer.

In a review of 37 imaging studies related to intelligence, including their own, Richard Haier of the University of California, Irvine and Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico have uncovered evidence of a distinct neurobiology of human intelligence. Their Parieto-Frontal Integration Theory (P-FIT) identifies a brain network related to intelligence, one that primarily involves areas in the frontal and the parietal lobes.
“Recent neuroscience studies suggest that intelligence is related to how well information travels throughout the brain,” said Haier, a professor of psychology in the School of Medicine and longtime human intelligence researcher. “Our review of imaging studies identifies the stations along the routes intelligent information processing takes. Once we know where the stations are, we can study how they relate to intelligence.”
The data suggest that some of the brain areas related to intelligence are the same areas related to attention and memory and to more complex functions like language. Haier and Jung say this possible integration of cognitive functions suggests that intelligence levels might be based on how efficient the frontal-parietal networks process information.
Brain imaging studies of intelligence are relatively new, with Haier doing some of the first ones only 20 years ago. Although there is still discussion about how to define and measure intelligence, Haier and Jung found surprising consistency in the studies they reviewed despite the fact the studies represented a variety of approaches.
A detailed report on this research including peer commentary from 19 researchers appears online in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
In his peer commentary, University of Washington psychologist Earl Hunt writes: “The Jung & Haier P-FIT model shows how far we have progressed toward understanding the biological basis of intelligence. Twenty-five years ago researchers in the field were engaged in an unedifying discussion of the relation between skull sizes and intelligence test scores. By taking advantage of the huge advances in measurement of the brain that have occurred in the past quarter century, [Jung and Haier] can take the far more sophisticated view that individual differences in intelligence depend, in part, upon individual differences in specific areas of the brain and in the connections between them.”
Haier and Jung have made some of the seminal findings in intelligence studies. In a 2004 study, they found that regions related to general intelligence are located throughout the brain and that a single “intelligence center,” such as the frontal lobe, is unlikely. And in a 2005 study, they found that while there are essentially no disparities in general intelligence between the sexes, women have more white matter and men more gray matter related to intelligence test scores, suggesting that no single neuroanatomical structure determines general intelligence and that different types of brain designs can produce equivalent intellectual performance.
“Genetic research has demonstrated that intelligence levels can be inherited, and since genes work through biology, there must be a biological basis for intelligence,” Haier said. “We have a long way to go before we understand the details, but our P-FIT model provides a framework for testing new hypotheses in future experiments.”
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of California - Irvine.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

Is ‘Do Unto Others’ Written Into Our Genes?

Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/18/science/18mora.html?_r=1&ref=science&oref=slogin
By NICHOLAS WADE

Published: September 18, 2007

Where do moral rules come from? From reason, some philosophers say. From God, say believers. Seldom considered is a source now being advocated by some biologists, that of evolution. At first glance, natural selection and the survival of the fittest may seem to reward only the most selfish values. But for animals that live in groups, selfishness must be strictly curbed or there will be no advantage to social living. Could the behaviors evolved by social animals to make societies work be the foundation from which human morality evolved? In a series of recent articles and a book, “The Happiness Hypothesis,” Jonathan Haidt, a moral psychologist at the University of Virginia, has been constructing a broad evolutionary view of morality that traces its connections both to religion and to politics. Dr. Haidt (pronounced height) began his research career by probing the emotion of disgust. Testing people’s reactions to situations like that of a hungry family that cooked and ate its pet dog after it had become roadkill, he explored the phenomenon of moral dumbfounding — when people feel strongly that something is wrong but cannot explain why. Dumbfounding led him to view morality as driven by two separate mental systems, one ancient and one modern, though the mind is scarcely aware of the difference. The ancient system, which he calls moral intuition, is based on the emotion-laden moral behaviors that evolved before the development of language. The modern system — he calls it moral judgment — came after language, when people became able to articulate why something was right or wrong. The emotional responses of moral intuition occur instantaneously — they are primitive gut reactions that evolved to generate split-second decisions and enhance survival in a dangerous world. Moral judgment, on the other hand, comes later, as the conscious mind develops a plausible rationalization for the decision already arrived at through moral intuition. Moral dumbfounding, in Dr. Haidt’s view, occurs when moral judgment fails to come up with a convincing explanation for what moral intuition has decided. So why has evolution equipped the brain with two moral systems when just one might seem plenty? “We have a complex animal mind that only recently evolved language and language-based reasoning,” Dr. Haidt said. “No way was control of the organism going to be handed over to this novel faculty.” He likens the mind’s subterranean moral machinery to an elephant, and conscious moral reasoning to a small rider on the elephant’s back. Psychologists and philosophers have long taken a far too narrow view of morality, he believes, because they have focused on the rider and largely ignored the elephant. Dr. Haidt developed a better sense of the elephant after visiting India at the suggestion of an anthropologist, Richard Shweder. In Bhubaneswar, in the Indian state of Orissa, Dr. Haidt saw that people recognized a much wider moral domain than the issues of harm and justice that are central to Western morality. Indians were concerned with integrating the community through rituals and committed to concepts of religious purity as a way to restrain behavior. On his return from India, Dr. Haidt combed the literature of anthropology and psychology for ideas about morality throughout the world. He identified five components of morality that were common to most cultures. Some concerned the protection of individuals, others the ties that bind a group together. Of the moral systems that protect individuals, one is concerned with preventing harm to the person and the other with reciprocity and fairness. Less familiar are the three systems that promote behaviors developed for strengthening the group. These are loyalty to the in-group, respect for authority and hierarchy, and a sense of purity or sanctity. The five moral systems, in Dr. Haidt’s view, are innate psychological mechanisms that predispose children to absorb certain virtues. Because these virtues are learned, morality may vary widely from culture to culture, while maintaining its central role of restraining selfishness. In Western societies, the focus is on protecting individuals by insisting that everyone be treated fairly. Creativity is high, but society is less orderly. In many other societies, selfishness is suppressed “through practices, rituals and stories that help a person play a cooperative role in a larger social entity,” Dr. Haidt said.
He is aware that many people — including “the politically homogeneous discipline of psychology” — equate morality with justice, rights and the welfare of the individual, and dismiss everything else as mere social convention. But many societies around the world do in fact behave as if loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity are moral concepts, Dr. Haidt notes, and this justifies taking a wider view of the moral domain. The idea that morality and sacredness are intertwined, he said, may now be out of fashion but has a venerable pedigree, tracing back to Emile Durkheim, a founder of sociology. Dr. Haidt believes that religion has played an important role in human evolution by strengthening and extending the cohesion provided by the moral systems. “If we didn’t have religious minds we would not have stepped through the transition to groupishness,” he said. “We’d still be just small bands roving around.” Religious behavior may be the result of natural selection, in his view, shaped at a time when early human groups were competing with one another. “Those who found ways to bind themselves together were more successful,” he said. Dr. Haidt came to recognize the importance of religion by a roundabout route. “I first found divinity in disgust,” he writes in his book “The Happiness Hypothesis.” The emotion of disgust probably evolved when people became meat eaters and had to learn which foods might be contaminated with bacteria, a problem not presented by plant foods. Disgust was then extended to many other categories, he argues, to people who were unclean, to unacceptable sexual practices and to a wide class of bodily functions and behaviors that were seen as separating humans from animals. “Imagine visiting a town,” Dr. Haidt writes, “where people wear no clothes, never bathe, have sex ‘doggie style’ in public, and eat raw meat by biting off pieces directly from the carcass.” He sees the disgust evoked by such a scene as allied to notions of physical and religious purity. Purity is, in his view, a moral system that promotes the goals of controlling selfish desires and acting in a religiously approved way. Notions of disgust and purity are widespread outside Western cultures. “Educated liberals are the only group to say, ‘I find that disgusting but that doesn’t make it wrong,’ ” Dr. Haidt said. Working with a graduate student, Jesse Graham, Dr. Haidt has detected a striking political dimension to morality. He and Mr. Graham asked people to identify their position on a liberal-conservative spectrum and then complete a questionnaire that assessed the importance attached to each of the five moral systems. (The test, called the moral foundations questionnaire, can be taken online, at http://www.yourmorals.org/.) They found that people who identified themselves as liberals attached great weight to the two moral systems protective of individuals — those of not harming others and of doing as you would be done by. But liberals assigned much less importance to the three moral systems that protect the group, those of loyalty, respect for authority and purity. Conservatives placed value on all five moral systems but they assigned less weight than liberals to the moralities protective of individuals. Dr. Haidt believes that many political disagreements between liberals and conservatives may reflect the different emphasis each places on the five moral categories. Take attitudes to contemporary art and music. Conservatives fear that subversive art will undermine authority, violate the in-group’s traditions and offend canons of purity and sanctity. Liberals, on the other hand, see contemporary art as protecting equality by assailing the establishment, especially if the art is by oppressed groups. Extreme liberals, Dr. Haidt argues, attach almost no importance to the moral systems that protect the group. Because conservatives do give some weight to individual protections, they often have a better understanding of liberal views than liberals do of conservative attitudes, in his view. Dr. Haidt, who describes himself as a moderate liberal, says that societies need people with both types of personality. “A liberal morality will encourage much greater creativity but will weaken social structure and deplete social capital,” he said. “I am really glad we have New York and San Francisco — most of our creativity comes out of cities like these. But a nation that was just New York and San Francisco could not survive very long. Conservatives give more to charity and tend to be more supportive of essential institutions like the military and law enforcement.” Other psychologists have mixed views about Dr. Haidt’s ideas. Steven Pinker, a cognitive scientist at Harvard, said, “I’m a big fan of Haidt’s work.” He added that the idea of including purity in the moral domain could make psychological sense even if purity had no place in moral reasoning. But Frans B. M. de Waal, a primatologist at Emory University, said he disagreed with Dr. Haidt’s view that the task of morality is to suppress selfishness. Many animals show empathy and altruistic tendencies but do not have moral systems. “For me, the moral system is one that resolves the tension between individual and group interests in a way that seems best for the most members of the group, hence promotes a give and take,” Dr. de Waal said. He said that he also disagreed with Dr. Haidt’s alignment of liberals with individual rights and conservatives with social cohesiveness. “It is obvious that liberals emphasize the common good — safety laws for coal mines, health care for all, support for the poor — that are not nearly as well recognized by conservatives,” Dr. de Waal said. That alignment also bothers John T. Jost, a political psychologist at New York University. Dr. Jost said he admired Dr. Haidt as a “very interesting and creative social psychologist” and found his work useful in drawing attention to the strong moral element in political beliefs. But the fact that liberals and conservatives agree on the first two of Dr. Haidt’s principles — do no harm and do unto others as you would have them do unto you — means that those are good candidates to be moral virtues. The fact that liberals and conservatives disagree on the other three principles “suggests to me that they are not general moral virtues but specific ideological commitments or values,” Dr. Jost said. In defense of his views, Dr. Haidt said that moral claims could be valid even if not universally acknowledged. “It is at least possible,” he said, “that conservatives and traditional societies have some moral or sociological insights that secular liberals do not understand.”

Fausto Intilla
www.oloscience.com

Reading Process Is Surprisingly Different That Previously Thought, Technology Shows

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070910092543.htm

Science Daily — Being able to read competently is one of the most important skills we need to function in today’s fast-paced society. Analysing the way we read can offer valuable insights into how we process visual information.

Scientists have been interested in the movements of our eyes while reading for forty years. However, until now most assumed that when we read both eyes look at the same letter of a word concurrently.
Now ground-breaking research by cognitive psychologist Professor Simon Liversedge and his team at the University of Southampton has shown that this is not actually the case. They found that our eyes are actually up to something much more exciting when we read - our eyes look at different letters in the same word and then combine the different images through a process known as fusion.
The research Prof. Liversedge will present at the BA Festival of Science in York shows that the reading process is not as simple as one might think; it is rarely a case of the eyes scanning the page smoothly from left to right. Depending on what we are reading and how hard we are finding the information to digest our eyes make small jerky movements, that allow us to focus on a particularly difficult word or often re-read passages we didn’t get the first time. Analysing these eye movements enables psychologists to understand how our brain processes the sentence.
With sophisticated eye tracking equipment able to determine which letter of a font-size 14 word a person is looking at every millisecond from 1 metre away, Prof. Liversedge’s team went one further and looked at the letters within the word within the sentence. They were able to deduce that when our eyes are not looking at the same letter of the word, they are usually about two letters apart. Prof. Liversedge explains: ‘Although this difference might sound small, in fact it represents a very substantial difference in terms of the precise "picture" of the world that each eye delivers to the brain.'
So if our eyes are looking at different parts of the same word, thereby receiving different information from each eye, how is it that we are able to see the words clearly enough to read them? There are two ways the brain can do this; either the image from one of the eyes is blocked or the two different images are somehow fused together. To test how the latter mechanism might work, the team chose words that could easily split in two, such as cowboy, and presented half of the word to the left eye, and half to the right eye separately. They then analysed readers’ eye movements when reading sentences containing these particular words presented in this way.
‘We were able to clearly show that we experience a single, very clear and crisp visual representation due to fusion of the two different images from each eye,’ he explains. ‘Also when we decide which word to look at next we work out how far to move our eyes based on the fused visual representation built from the disparate signals of each eye.
‘A comprehensive understanding of the psychological processes underlying reading is vital if we are to develop better methods of teaching children to read and offer remedial treatments for those with reading disorders such as dyslexia. Our team are now measuring the range of visual disparities over which both adult and child readers can successfully fuse words.’
Professor Simon Liversedge will give his talk, ‘What our eyes get up to while we read’ as part of the session entitled ‘What eye movements tell us about the brain and language’ on 14 September at Vanbrugh V/045, University of York as part of the BA Festival of Science.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by British Association for the Advancement of Science.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

Adult Brain Can Change, Study Confirms

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070905155440.htm

Science Daily — It is well established that a child's brain has a remarkable capacity for change, but controversy continues about the extent to which such plasticity exists in the adult human primary sensory cortex.

Now, neuroscientists from MIT and Johns Hopkins University have used converging evidence from brain imaging and behavioral studies to show that the adult visual cortex does indeed reorganize--and that the change affects visual perception.
The authors believe that as scientists find ways to use this adaptive ability, the work could have relevance to topics ranging from learning to designing interventions for improving recovery following stroke, brain injury, or visual disorders.
Animal studies conducted two decades ago and using single cell recording of neurons found that the adult animal brain can change, but shed little information about the adult human brain. In 2005, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study led by Professor Nancy Kanwisher at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT found evidence of plasticity in the visual cortex of adults with macular degeneration, an eye disease that deprives regions of the cortex of visual information.
But another fMRI study of macular degeneration found no such evidence, and an animal study using both single cell recordings and fMRI also questioned the 20-year-old animal work.
Lead author Daniel Dilks, a postdoctoral associate in Kanwisher's lab who conducted the current work while a graduate student at Johns Hopkins in senior author Michael McCloskey's lab, jumped into the fray when he found BL, a stroke patient.
BL's stroke damaged the optic radiation fibers, which transmit information from the eye to the primary visual cortex, but the cortex itself remained intact. The damage eliminated input from the upper left visual field to the corresponding region of the primary visual cortex, thereby depriving a region of cortex and creating a blind area in the upper left visual field.
The researchers wanted to find out what happened to that deprived piece of cortex. "We discovered that it took on new functional properties, and BL sees differently as a consequence of that cortical reorganization," explains Dilks.
BL had reported that things "looked distorted" in the lower left visual field (below his blind area). The researchers hypothesized that the distortions resulted from cortical reorganization in the deprived cortex. To isolate that distortion, they had BL fixate on a center dot while objects, such as squares, appeared in various parts of the visual field. As expected, BL saw nothing when a square appeared in his blind area.
But when the square appeared just below the blind area, he perceived the square as a rectangle extending upwards into the blind area. Likewise, he saw triangles as "pencil-like", and circles as "cigar-like".
Subsequent fMRI studies confirmed that the visually deprived cortex (representing the upper left visual field) was responding to information coming from the lower left visual field. The deprived cortex assumed new properties, a hallmark of plasticity, and that explained the visual distortions.
Dilks is continuing this work in postdoctoral studies in Kanwisher's lab. In addition to Michael McCloskey, John Serences of University of California Irvine, and Benjamin Rosenau and Steven Yantis, both of Johns Hopkins, coauthored the Journal of Neuroscience paper. An Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship and a Graduate Research Fellowship, both from the National Science Foundation, and the NIH funded the Johns Hopkins work.
The study appears online Sept. 5 in an advance publication of the Journal of Neuroscience.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Fausto Intilla

www.oloscience.com

Teen Suicide Rate: Highest Increase In 15 Years

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070907221530.htm

Science Daily — Following a decline of more than 28 percent, the suicide rate for 10- to-24-year-olds increased by 8 percent, the largest single-year rise in 15 years, according to a report just released in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR).
The decline took place from 1990 to 2003 (from 9.48 to 6.78 per 100,000 people), and the increase took place from 2003 to 2004, (from 6.78 to 7.32), the report said.
“This is the biggest annual increase that we've seen in 15 years. We don't yet know if this is a short-lived increase or if it's the beginning of a trend,” said Dr. Ileana Arias, director of CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. “Either way, it's a harsh reminder that suicide and suicide attempts are affecting too many youth and young adults. We need to make sure suicide prevention efforts are continuous and reaching children and young adults.”
The report is an analysis of annual data from the CDC's National Vital Statistics System (NVSS). NVSS data are comprised of birth, death, marriage, divorce, and fetal death records in the United States. Researchers looked at trends during the 15-year period by gender, age group and suicide method. It did not examine reasons for the changes in suicide rates.
An increase in the suicide rates for three gender-age groups accounts for the increase in the overall suicide rate, the report said. Rates rose for 10- to-14-year-old females, 15 -to-19-year-old females and 15- to-19-year-old males from 2003 to 2004.
For 10- to-14-year-old females, the rate increased from 0.54 per 100,000 in 2003 to 0.95 per 100,000 in 2004
For 15-to-19 year-old females the rate increased from 2.66 to 3.52 per 100,000
For 15-to-19 year-old males, the rate increased from 11.61 to 12.65 per 100,000
Prior to 2003, the rates for all three groups were generally decreasing.
The analysis also found that changes had taken place in the methods used to attempt suicide. In 1990, firearms were the most common method for both girls and boys. However, in 2004, hanging/suffocation was the most common method of suicide among girls, accounting for 71.4 percent of suicides among 10- to-14-year-old girls and 49 percent among 15-to-19 year-old girls. From 2003 to 2004, there was a 119 percent increase in hanging/suffocation suicides among 10-to -14-year-old girls. For boys and young men, firearms are still the most common method.
“It is important for parents, health care professionals, and educators to recognize the warning signs of suicide in youth,” said Dr. Keri Lubell, a behavioral scientist in CDC's Injury Center and lead author of the study. “Parents and other caring adults should look for changes in youth such as talking about taking one's life, feeling sad or hopeless about the future. Also look for changes in eating or sleeping habits and even losing the desire to take part in favorite activities.”
A previously published CDC survey of youth in grades 9 to 12 in public and private schools in the United States found that 17 percent reported “seriously considering” suicide, 13 percent reported creating a plan and 8 percent reported trying to take their own life in the 12 months preceding the survey.
“This study demands that we strengthen our efforts to help parents, schools and health care providers prevent things that increase the risk of suicide,” said Dr. Arias. “We need to build on the efforts dedicated to education, screening and treatment and bridge the gap between the knowledge we currently have and the action we must take.”
CDC's suicide prevention efforts include expanded surveillance systems for suicide through the National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS). NVDRS is a comprehensive, linked reporting system that collects and centralizes information on suicides and homicides from a variety of sources, such as medical examiners and coroners, law enforcement, hospitals, public health officials and crime labs. As this system evolves, it provides a promising approach to capture data that will help to better understand the circumstances surrounding suicide. Information from NVDRS is helping officials, organizations, and communities develop, implement, and evaluate effective prevention policies and programs.
CDC is also working with states and tribal governments to implement the National Strategy for Suicide Prevention. The plan is designed to further the dialogue and action that has already begun in communities and to serve as a springboard for changing attitudes, policies, and services.
A resource for helping to prevent suicide is the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline toll-free number, 1-800-273-TALK (273-8255).
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Centers For Disease Control.

What Men And Women Really Want In A Mate

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/09/070903204845.htm

Science Daily — While humans may pride themselves on being highly evolved, most still behave like the stereotypical Neanderthals when it comes to choosing a mate, according to research by Indiana University cognitive scientist Peter Todd. In a new study, Todd and colleagues found that though individuals may claim otherwise, beauty is the key ingredient for men while women, the much choosier of the sexes, leverage their looks for security and commitment.
This formula has served humans throughout time, with the model of choosy females reflected in most mammals.
"Evolutionary theories in psychology suggest that men and women should trade off different traits in each other, and when we look at the actual mate choices people make, this is what we find evidence for," Todd said. "Ancestral individuals who made their mate choices in this way -- women trading off their attractiveness for higher quality men and men looking for any attractive women who will accept them -- would have had an evolutionary advantage in greater numbers of successful offspring."
Not exactly politically correct? Participants in Todd's study might verbally agree, though their actions said something different.
The study used a speed-dating session in Germany to compare what people say they want in a mate with whom they actually choose. Speed dating, an increasingly popular way for singles to meet, involves sessions in which men and women have numerous "mini dates" with up to 30 different people, each date lasting anywhere from three to five minutes. After every date, the men and women checked a box on a card noting whether they would like to see the other person again. Todd and his colleagues describe such speed-dating events as a "microcosm where mate choices are made sequentially in a faster and more formalized fashion than in daily life."
For Todd's study, 46 adults in a speed-dating session were also asked to fill out a questionnaire beforehand assessing themselves and their ideal mate according to evolutionarily relevant traits, such as physical attractiveness, present and future financial status, health and parenting qualities.
Not surprisingly, Todd said, participants stated they wanted to find someone who was like themselves -- a socially acceptable answer. But once the sessions began, the men sought the more attractive women and the women were drawn to material wealth and security, setting their standards according to how attractive they viewed themselves. Furthermore, while men on average wanted to see every second woman again, the women wanted to meet only a third of the men again.
While the study's results came as no surprise to Todd, the research usefulness of the speed-dating forum did. Todd and his colleagues are conducting several other speed-dating studies that could confirm the results.
"Speed dating lets us look at a large number of mate choice decisions collected in a short amount of time," Todd said. "It only captures the initial stage of the extended process involved in long-term mate choice. But that initial expression of interest is crucial for launching everything else."
Reference: "Different cognitive processes underlie human mate choices and mate preferences," to be published the week of Sept. 4-7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Coauthors are Lars Penke, Department of Psychology, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany; Barbara Fasolo, Operational Research Group, London School of Economics, London, U.K.; and Alison P. Lenton, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, Edenburgh, Scotland, U.K.
The study was supported by the Max Planck Society, Germany's national science foundation.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by Indiana University.

Fausto Intilla
www.oloscience.com

Breaking Up Is Hard To Do

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070831150021.htm

Science Daily — “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” is advice from a popular 1970s song, but older women going through a relationship breakup may have health problems to go along with their broken hearts, a University of Alabama researcher has found.

Dr. Bronwen Lichtenstein, UA assistant professor of criminal justice who specializes in women’s issues, recently completed a study of the health risks women over age 35 faced when they returned to the dating scene after the breakup of a long-term relationship.
Lichtenstein was investigating the theory that after an older woman leaves a long-term relationship she may make risky dating choices. “Being in a relationship for 20 years means you have no idea what the dating scene is like today,” she said.
Lichtenstein surveyed women in the West Alabama area and found that these women – many of them like your mother or your grandmother – often faced depression, lack of health information, and lack of social support after their relationships ended.
How did they cope with starting over? Well, it may start with food, Lichtenstein found. “One of the most interesting things for me was that they told me they often meet people in grocery stores. There’s a whole dating scene for this age group going on in Wal-Mart and Publix,” she reports.
The hooking-up over food phenomenon may be happening because there are few, if any, places where older people can meet. “Young people have places to go to meet one another and that doesn’t exist for a lot of older people -- some may be embarrassed to go to church groups for singles or they may feel that the groups are for younger people,” Lichtenstein said.
Lichtenstein looked at how these women, who were recently divorced or widowed, were equipped with the proper health information about the spread of sexually transmitted diseases when dating. “Women are biologically more at risk for STDs at 50 than at 20, and most women don’t realize it,” the UA College of Arts and Sciences professor noted.
Almost all the women in the study reported being depressed after ending a relationship, and at least half the women had been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted infection. The women faced biological, emotional and personal issues, although the real problem is that the issues are not being addressed, Lichtenstein found.
“There is a lot of uncertainty and anxiety in returning to the dating scene – women ask ‘Am I attractive?’ and ‘What are the rules?’ – but nobody knows what the rules are because everything’s changed,” she said.
Who fares the best the second time around?
“Women who are confident and assured of themselves seem to deal with these relationship issues better. They may not be in a better place, but they find other things to do and find a satisfying life on their own.
“A good example of this is a 62-year-old woman who joined a motorcycle club and began a wonderful social life. Another example would be a woman who never married but owned her own business and had a lot of friends,” she said.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Alabama.

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