Behavioral & Social Sciences,News & Press - A Blog by F.Intilla (WWW.OLOSCIENCE.COM)

Animal Instincts: Why Do Unhappy Consumers Prefer Tactile Sensations?

2011-06-18T08:02:00.000-07:00

ScienceDaily (June 16, 2011) — A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research explains why sad people are more likely to want to hug a teddy bear than seek out a visual experience such as looking at art. Hint: It has to do with our mammalian instincts. "Human affective systems evolved from mammalian affective systems, and when mammals are young and incapable of thinking, their brain systems have to make these pups able to perform the 'correct' behavior," write authors Dan King (NUS Business School, Singapore) and Chris Janiszewski (University of Florida, Gainesville). One way the brain encourages correct behavior is to use the mammal's affective state to change the pleasure response to major sensory channels.
For example, mammal pups that are in a negative state are typically injured, sick, heat deprived, or lost. The brain tries to restore physical resources to these vulnerable creatures by increasing their pleasure response to tactile stimulation. "In this way, the mammal will experience pleasure from engaging in behaviors that mitigate the negative affect state (for example, returning to its mother for warmth, protection, and nourishment)," the authors write.
Mammals that are in a positive state are primed for visual exploration, to fulfill goals of protection and territorial expansion. "Animal studies have shown that excited organisms have heightened visual systems and make more visual explorations," the authors explain.
Across five experiments the authors found that consumers felt more pleasure from tactile attributes of products when they were in negative states, and more pleasure from visual aspects when they were in positive states. For example, in one experiment, participants who were in a negative affective state were more appreciative of the tactile qualities of a hand lotion, whereas those in a positive state were more appreciative of the lotion's visual qualities.
"This research suggests that marketers may be able to segment their markets based on the affective propensities of the consumer, and prioritize tactile and visual quality for these different segments," the authors write. "A dollar invested in the 'correct' attribute will generate more pleasure, and hence, will be more likely to be rewarded in terms of higher sales." Story Source:
The above story is reprinted (with editorial adaptations by ScienceDaily staff) from materials provided by University of Chicago Press Journals, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Environment Plays Key Role in Developing Reading Skills, Study Finds.

2010-01-14T01:13:00.001-08:00

A new study of twins is the first to demonstrate that environment plays an important role in reading growth over time. (Credit: iStockphoto/Ekaterina Monakhova)

Source: ScienceDaily

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ScienceDaily (Jan. 14, 2010) — While genetics play a key role in children's initial reading skills, a new study of twins is the first to demonstrate that environment plays an important role in reading growth over time.

The results give further evidence that children can make gains in reading during their early school years, above and beyond the important genetic factors that influence differences in reading, said Stephen Petrill, lead author of the study and professor of human development and family science at Ohio State University.
"We certainly have to take more seriously genetic influences on learning, but children who come into school with poor reading skills can make strides with proper instruction," Petrill said.
"The findings support the need for sustained efforts to promote reading development in children that take both genetic and environmental influences into account."
While other studies have shown that both genetics and environment influence reading skills, this is the first to show their relative roles in how quickly or slowly children's reading skills improve over time.
The study appears online in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.
The study participants were 314 Ohio twins participating in the Western Reserve Reading Project. This study included 135 identical twins and 179 same-sex fraternal twins.
The twins began the study when they were in kindergarten or first grade and were assessed in their homes when they enrolled, and annually for the next two years.
At each home visit, the twins were given a 90-minute battery of reading-based measures. Among other things, the tests measured word and letter identification, the ability to sound out words, and the speed at which children could name a series of letters.
The researchers compared how twins scored on the tests and then used a statistical analysis to determine how much growth in their performance could be explained by genetics and how much by environmental factors.
Environmental factors include everything the children experience -- how they are cared for by their parents, how much they are read to, the neighborhood they live in, nutrition and their instruction in schools, among other factors.
The findings showed that when children start out reading, both genetics and environment play a role in readings skills, depending on the skills assessed. For word and letter identification, genetics explained about one-third of the test results, while environment explained two-thirds. For vocabulary and sound awareness, it was equally split between genetics and environment. For the speed tests, it was three-quarters genetic.
But when the researchers measured growth in reading skills, environment became much more important, Petrill said.
For reading skills that are taught, such as words and letters, the environment is almost completely responsible for growth. For awareness of sounds in reading, about 80 percent of growth was explained by the environment. Speed measures were the only ones where genetics still played a large role.
"Regardless of where children start as far as reading skills, and the impact that genetics and environment had on their initial skills, we found that their environment had an impact in how fast or how slowly those reading skills developed," Petrill said.
Petrill emphasized that a child's environment is much more than just the instruction he or she receives in school. However, instruction is likely a key part of how reading skills grow over time.
Petrill said much more research needs to be done examining the roles of genetics and the environment in shaping how children learn to read.
"We believe that both factors play a role in reading, which is very similar to what researchers find in health issues such as heart disease and obesity," Petrill said. "But we know a lot more about the relative impacts of genetics and environment on the biological systems that influence heart disease than we do in reading."
For example, people can change their environment to help lower their risk of heart disease, no matter their genetic susceptibility to the disease, he said.
Petrill said he hopes we can do the same to help children improve their reading.
"Understanding the causes of why kids differ in reading skills, and the roles of genetics and environment, could help us understand how to teach them better," he said.

Story Source:
Adapted from materials provided by Ohio State University. Original article written by Jeff Grabmeier.
Journal Reference:
Stephen A. Petrill, Sara A. Hart, Nicole Harlaar, Jessica Logan, Laura M. Justice, Christopher Schatschneider, Lee Thompson, Laura S. DeThorne, Kirby Deater-Deckard, Laurie Cutting. Genetic and environmental influences on the growth of early reading skills. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 2010; DOI: 10.1111/j.1469-7610.2009.02204.x

Why Do People 'Play the Longshot' but Buy Insurance? It's in Our Genes.

2010-01-13T12:07:00.001-08:00

New research by economists and molecular geneticists helps answer why people tend to be risk-preferring when facing longshot risks involving significant gains, such as playing the lottery. (Credit: iStockphoto/Steve Snowden)

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Source: ScienceDaily

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ScienceDaily (Jan. 13, 2010) — Why do some people like to take risks by playing "longshot" payoffs while, on the other hand, taking the opposite tack by buying insurance to reduce risks? A team of economists and molecular geneticists from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and two Asian universities says the answer can be found in our genetic makeup.

The team set out to tackle the long-standing question in economic theory as to why people tend to be risk-preferring when facing longshot risks involving significant gains, such as betting on race horses, and on the other hand are risk averse when facing significant losses -- buying home or car insurance, for instance.
Many economists have struggled with this paradox, says Richard Ebstein, the Sylvia Scheinfeld Professor of Human Genetics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has probed this subject along with economists Prof. Soo Hong Chew of the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Dr. Songfa Zhong of NUS and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
Ebstein notes the psychological explanation suggested by former Hebrew University psychology Professors Daniel Kahneman (a Nobel Prize laureate) and Amos Tversky, as embodied in their widely accepted prospect theory, to explain why people play the lottery and at the same time purchase insurance. Although prospect theory offers a psychological explanation for this facet of economic behavior, the underlying neurobiological and neurogenetic mechanisms have remained obscure until now, said Ebstein.
In an article just published online on PLoS ONE, Ebstein and his colleagues combined the tools of experimental economics and molecular genetics to examine the role of a well-characterized gene, monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), in predicting whether subjects are more likely to buy the lottery or insurance (or both) under well-controlled laboratory conditions.
In the experiment, 350 Han Chinese subjects were recruited in Beijing and participated in two simple choice tasks, representing proclivities to purchase lottery tickets and insurance, using real monetary incentives.
For example, the subjects were given options to keep a very small cash return upfront, with no risk, or of gambling bigger amounts that they were given upfront but with a minimal chance of actually winning and keeping the money in a lottery drawing. In the second task, concerning insurance, subjects were asked whether or not they would insure a certain but insignificant loss or would take out insurance on a larger amount with a real but low risk of actual loss.
They found that subjects with a high-activity variation of the MAOA gene are characterized by a preference for the longshot lottery and also less insurance purchasing than subjects with the low-activity genetic version. This is the first result to link attitude towards longshot risks to a specific gene. It complements other, recent findings on the neurobiological basis of economic risk taking.
As the world financial system slowly emerges from the near economic meltdown, it is worth considering, says Ebstein, that inborn biases, coded by common genetic variants, may be a major factor in fueling people's actions regarding longshot options --- with concomitant effects on financial markets.

Story Source:
Adapted from materials provided by The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Journal Reference:
Songfa Zhong, Salomon Israel, Hong Xue, Richard P. Ebstein, Soo Hong Chew. Monoamine Oxidase A Gene (MAOA) Associated with Attitude Towards Longshot Risks. PLoS ONE, 2009; 4 (12): e8516 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0008516

How Birth Order Affects Your Personality.

2010-01-12T06:50:00.000-08:00

Source: Scientific American

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For decades the evidence has been inconclusive, but new studies show that family position may truly affect intelligence and personality.
By Joshua K. Hartshorne

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When I tell people I study whether birth order affects personality, I usually get blank looks. It sounds like studying whether the sky is blue. Isn’t it common sense? Popular books invoke birth order for self-discovery, relationship tips, business advice and parenting guidance in titles such as The Birth Order Book: Why You Are the Way You Are (Revell, 2009). Newspapers and morning news shows debate the importance of the latest findings (“Latter-born children engage in more risky behavior; what should parents do?”) while tossing in savory anecdotes (“Did you know that 21 of the first 23 astronauts into space were firstborns?”).
But when scientists scrutinized the data, they found that the evidence just did not hold up. In fact, until very recently there were no convincing findings that linked birth order to personality or behavior. Our common perception that birth order matters was written off as an example of our well-established tendency to remember and accept evidence that supports our pet theories while readily forgetting or overlooking that which does not. But two studies from the past three years finally found measurable effects: our position in the family does indeed affect both our IQ and our personality. It may be time to reconsider birth order as a real influence over whom we grow up to be.

Size Matters:

Before discussing the new findings, it will help to explain why decades of research that seemed to show birth-order effects was, in fact, flawed. Put simply, birth order is intricately linked to family size. A child from a two-kid family has a 50 percent chance of being a firstborn, whereas a child from a five-kid family has only a 20 percent chance of being a firstborn. So the fact that astronauts are disproportionately firstborns, for example, could merely show that they come from smaller families—not that firstborns have any particularly astronautic qualities. (Of course, firstborns may indeed have astronautic qualities. The point is that with these data, we cannot tell.)
There are many reasons that family size could affect our predilections and personalities. More children mean that parental resources (money, time and attention) have to be spread more thinly. Perhaps more telling, family size is associated with many important social factors, such as ethnicity, education and wealth. For example, wealthier, better-educated parents typically have fewer children. If astronauts are more likely to have well-educated, comfortable parents, then they are also more likely to come from a smaller family and thus are more likely to be a firstborn.
Of the some 65,000 scholarly articles about birth order indexed by Google Scholar, the vast majority suffer from this problem, making the research difficult to interpret. Many of the few remaining studies fail to show significant effects of birth order. In 1983 psychiatrists Cecile Ernst and Jules Angst of the University of Zurich determined, after a thorough review of the literature, that birth-order effects were not supported by the evidence. In 1998 psychologist Judith Rich Harris published another comprehensive attack on the concept in The Nurture Assumption (Free Press). By 2003 cognitive scientist Steven Pinker of Harvard University found it necessary to spend only two pages of his 439-page discussion of nature and nurture, The Blank Slate (Penguin), dismissing birth order as irrelevant.

New Evidence:

Even so, the case in 2003 against birth-order effects was mainly an absence of good evidence, rather than evidence of an absence. In fact, the past few years have provided good news for the theory. In 2007 Norwegian epidemiologists Petter Kristensen and Tor Bjerkedal published work showing a small but reliable negative correlation between IQ and birth order: the more older siblings one has, the lower one’s IQ. Whether birth order affects intelligence has been debated inconclusively since the late 1800s, although the sheer size of the study (about 250,000 Norwegian conscripts) and the rigorous controls for family size make this study especially convincing.

In 2009 my colleagues and I published evidence that birth order influences whom we choose as friends and spouses. Firstborns are more likely to associate with firstborns, middle-borns with middle-borns, last-borns with last-borns, and only children with only children. Because we were able to show the effect independent of family size, the finding is unlikely to be an artifact of class or ethnicity. The result is exactly what we should expect if birth order affects personality. Despite the adage that opposites attract, people tend to resemble their spouses in terms of personality. If spouses correlate on personality, and personality correlates with birth order, spouses should correlate on birth order.
Thus, the evidence seems to be shifting back in favor of our common intuition that our position in our family somehow affects who we become. The details, however, remain vague. The Norwegian study shows a slight effect on intelligence. The relationship study shows that oldest, middle, youngest and only children differ in some way yet gives no indication as to how. Moreover, although these effects are reasonably sized by the standards of research, they are small enough that it would not make any sense to organize college admissions or dating pools around birth order, much less NASA applicants.
Still, I expect people—myself included—will continue to try to make sense of the world through the prism of birth order. It’s fine for scientists to say “more study is needed,” but we must find love, gain self-knowledge and parent children now. In that sense, a great deal about who we are and how we think can be learned reading those shelves of birth order–related self-help books, even if the actual content is not yet—or will never be—experimentally confirmed.

Note:

This story was originally published with the title "Ruled by Birth Order?".

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2010-01-11T13:42:00.001-08:00

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Protection Or Peril? Gun Possession Of Questionable Value In An Assault, Study Finds.

2009-10-01T10:59:00.001-07:00

SOURCE

ScienceDaily (Sep. 30, 2009) — In a first-of its-kind study, epidemiologists at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine found that, on average, guns did not protect those who possessed them from being shot in an assault. The study estimated that people with a gun were 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than those not possessing a gun. The study was released online this month in the American Journal of Public Health, in advance of print publication in November 2009.
“This study helps resolve the long-standing debate about whether guns are protective or perilous,” notes study author Charles C. Branas, PhD, Associate Professor of Epidemiology. “Will possessing a firearm always safeguard against harm or will it promote a false sense of security?”
What Penn researchers found was alarming – almost five Philadelphians were shot every day over the course of the study and about 1 of these 5 people died. The research team concluded that, although successful defensive gun uses are possible and do occur each year, the chances of success are low. People should rethink their possession of guns or, at least, understand that regular possession necessitates careful safety countermeasures, write the authors. Suggestions to the contrary, especially for urban residents who may see gun possession as a defense against a dangerous environment should be discussed and thoughtfully reconsidered.
A 2005 National Academy of Science report concluded that we continue to know very little about the impact of gun possession on homicide or the utility of guns for self-defense. Past studies had explored the relationship between homicides and having a gun in the home, purchasing a gun, or owning a gun. These studies, unlike the Penn study, did not address the risk or protection that having a gun might create for a person at the time of a shooting.
Penn researchers investigated the link between being shot in an assault and a person’s possession of a gun at the time of the shooting. As identified by police and medical examiners, they randomly selected 677 cases of Philadelphia residents who were shot in an assault from 2003 to 2006. Six percent of these cases were in possession of a gun (such as in a holster, pocket, waistband, or vehicle) when they were shot.
These shooting cases were matched to Philadelphia residents who acted as the study’s controls. To identify the controls, trained phone canvassers called random Philadelphians soon after a reported shooting and asked about their possession of a gun at the time of the shooting. These random Philadelphians had not been shot and had nothing to do with the shooting. This is the same approach that epidemiologists have historically used to establish links between such things as smoking and lung cancer or drinking and car crashes.
“The US has at least one gun for every adult,” notes Branas. “Learning how to live healthy lives alongside guns will require more studies such as this one. This study should be the beginning of a better investment in gun injury research through various government and private agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control, which in the past have not been legally permitted to fund research ‘designed to affect the passage of specific Federal, State, or local legislation intended to restrict or control the purchase or use of firearms.’”
This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health. The authors are also indebted to numerous dedicated individuals at the Philadelphia Police, Public Health, Fire, and Revenue Departments as well as DataStat Inc, who collaborated on the study.
Therese S. Richmond, PhD, CRNP, School of Nursing; Dennis P. Culhane, PhD, School of Social Policy; Thomas R. Ten Have, PhD, MPH, and Douglas J. Wiebe, PhD, both from the School of Medicine, are co-authors.
Journal reference:
Charles C. Branas, Therese S. Richmond, Dennis P. Culhane, Thomas R. Ten Have, and Douglas J. Wiebe. Investigating the Link Between Gun Possession and Gun Assault. American Journal of Public Health, 2009; DOI: 10.2105/AJPH.2008.143099
Adapted from materials provided by University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Ego City: Cities Are Organized Like Human Brains.

2009-09-20T01:39:00.000-07:00

SOURCE

ScienceDaily (Sep. 19, 2009) — Cities are organized like brains, and the evolution of cities mirrors the evolution of human and animal brains, according to a new study by researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Just as advanced mammalian brains require a robust neural network to achieve richer and more complex thought, large cities require advanced highways and transportation systems to allow larger and more productive populations. The new study unearthed a striking similarity in how larger brains and cities deal with the difficult problem of maintaining sufficient interconnectedness.
“Natural selection has passively guided the evolution of mammalian brains throughout time, just as politicians and entrepreneurs have indirectly shaped the organization of cities large and small,” said Mark Changizi, a neurobiology expert and assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer, who led the study. “It seems both of these invisible hands have arrived at a similar conclusion: brains and cities, as they grow larger, have to be similarly densely interconnected to function optimally.”
As brains grow more complex from one species to the next, they change in structure and organization in order to achieve the right level of interconnectedness. One couldn’t simply grow a double-sized dog brain, for example, and expect it to have the same capabilities as a human brain. This is because, among other things, a human brain doesn’t merely have more “dog neurons,” but, instead, has neurons with a greater number of synapses than that of a dog – something crucial in helping to keep the human brain well connected.
As with brains, interconnectedness is also a critical component of the overall function of cities, Changizi said. One couldn’t put together three copies of Seattle (surface area of 83.9 sq. miles) and expect the result to have the same interconnectedness and efficiency as Chicago (surface area of 227.1 sq. miles). There would be too many highways with too few exits and lanes that are too narrow.
In exploring this topic, Changizi discovered evidence linking the size of a city or a brain to the number and size of its supporting infrastructure. He investigated and documented how the infrastructures scale up as the surface area of brains and cities increase.
As cities and the neocortex grow in surface area, the number of connectors – highways in cities and pyramidal neurons in brains – increases more slowly, as surface area to the 3/4 power, Changizi found. This means the number of connectors increases in both brains and cities as S3/4, where S = surface area. Similarly, as cities and brains grow, the total number of highway exits and synapses — which share a similar function as terminal points along highways and neurons — increases with an exponent of about 9/8. The number of exits per highway and synapses per neuron were also closely aligned, with an exponent of approximately 3/8.
These and other findings are detailed in the paper “Common Scaling Laws for City Highway Systems and the Mammalian Neocortex,” published this week in the journal Complexity. The complete paper may be viewed online at the Complexity Web site.
“When scaling up in size and function, both cities and brains seem to follow similar empirical laws,” Changizi said. “They have to efficiently maintain a fixed level of connectedness, independent of the physical size of the brain or city, in order to work properly.”
Marc Destefano, clinical assistant professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer, co-authored the paper.
Adapted from materials provided by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Swearing Can Actually Increase Pain Tolerance

2009-07-13T14:20:00.000-07:00

SOURCE

ScienceDaily (July 13, 2009) — Researchers from Keele University’s School of Psychology have determined that swearing can have a ‘pain-lessening effect’, according to new study published in the journal NeuroReport.

While swearing is often a common response to pain, Dr Richard Stephens and his colleagues, John Atkins and Andrew Kingston, were surprised to discover that no links had been established between swearing and the actual experience of physical pain. Since swearing often has a ‘catastrophising’ or exaggerating effect, serving to embellish or overstate the severity of pain, Stephens and his team hypothesised that swearing would actually decrease the individual’s tolerance of pain.
The Ice Water Test
Enlisting the help of 64 undergraduate volunteers, the team set out to test their theory. Each individual was asked to submerge their hand in a tub of ice 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 submerged in the ice water for a longer period of time when repeating the swear word, establishing a link between swearing and an increase in pain tolerance.
Fight-Or-Flight Response
While it isn’t 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. They suggest that the accelerated heart rates of the volunteers repeating the swear word may indicate an increase in aggression, in a classic fight-or-flight response of ‘downplaying feebleness in favour of a more pain-tolerant machismo.’ What is clear is that swearing triggers not only an emotional response, but a physical one too, which may explain why the centuries-old practice of cursing developed and still persists today.
Dr Richard Stephens said: “Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon. It taps into emotional brain centres and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain. Our research shows one potential reason why swearing developed and why it persists.”
Adapted from materials provided by Keele University.

Evolution Guides Cooperative Turn-taking, Game Theory-based Computer Simulations Show

2009-07-08T23:37:00.001-07:00

SOURCE

ScienceDaily (July 8, 2009) — It’s not just good manners to wait your turn – it’s actually down to evolution, according to new research by University of Leicester psychologists.

A study in the University’s School of Psychology sought to explain how turn-taking has evolved across a range of species. The conclusion is that there is an evolution-based “invisible hand” that guides our actions in this respect. What's more, the researchers have shown that this behavior can be simulated using a simple computer algorithm and basic genetic laws.
Professor Andrew Colman and Dr Lindsay Browning carried out the study due to appear in the September issue of the journal Evolutionary Ecology Research. The study has helped to explain the evolution of cooperative turn-taking.
Professor Colman said: “In human groups, turn-taking is usually planned and coordinated with the help of language. For example, people living together often agree to take turns washing up the dishes after meals or taking their children to school. But turn-taking has also evolved in many other species without language or the capacity to reach negotiated agreements. These include apes, monkeys, birds, and antelopes that take turns grooming each other, and mating pairs of Antarctic penguins that take turns foraging at sea while their partners incubate eggs or tend to chicks.
“It is far from obvious how turn-taking evolved without language or insight in animals shaped by natural selection to pursue their individual self-interests.”
The researchers say that playing “tit for tat” – copying in each time period whatever the other individual did in the previous period – can explain synchronized cooperation, but cannot fully explain turn-taking. “For example, many predatory animals hunt in pairs or larger groups, and this involves synchronized cooperation. ‘Tit for tat’ has been shown to work very well in initiating and sustaining this type of cooperation.”
“But where cooperation involves turn-taking, a ‘tit for tat’ instinct could sustain the pattern once it was established but could not initiate it in the first place. For example, in a mating pair of penguins who both went foraging or both incubated the eggs at the same time, ‘tit for tat’ would not be enough to evolve the habit of taking turns.”
Using evolutionary game theory and computer simulations, Professor Colman and Dr Browning discovered a simple variation of “tit for tat” that explains how turn-taking can evolve in organisms that pursue their individual self-interests robotically.
The researchers state: “Turn-taking is initiated only after a species has evolved at least two genetically different types that behave differently in initial, uncoordinated interactions with others. Then as soon as a pair coordinates by chance, they instinctively begin to play ‘tit for tat’. This locks them into mutually beneficial coordinated turn-taking indefinitely. Without genetic diversity, turn-taking cannot evolve in this simple way.”
Professor Colman added: “In our simulations, the individuals were computer programs that were not only dumb and robotic but also purely selfish. Nevertheless, they ended up taking turns in perfect coordination. We published indirect evidence for this in 2004; we have now shown it directly and found a simple explanation for it. Our findings confirm that cooperation does not always require benevolence or deliberate planning. This form of cooperation, at least, is guided by an ‘invisible hand’, as happens so often in Darwin’s theory of natural selection.”
Andrew Colman is a Professor of Psychology and Lindsay Browning is a former student and Honorary Visiting Fellow of the University of Leicester. The research, which used a specially developed genetic algorithm, was funded through an Auber Bequest Award from Scotland’s National Academy, The Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Journal reference:
Andrew M. Colman & Lindsay Browning. Evolution of cooperative turn-taking. Evolutionary Ecology Research, 2009; (forthcoming)
Adapted from materials provided by University of Leicester, via AlphaGalileo.

Why most "pedophiles" aren't really pedophiles, technically speaking?

2009-07-04T06:49:00.001-07:00

Source: Scientific American

By Jesse Bering

Michael Jackson probably wasn’t a pedophile—at least, not in the strict, biological sense of the word. It’s a morally loaded term, pedophile, that has become synonymous with the very basest of evils. (In fact it’s hard to even say it aloud without cringing, isn’t it?) But according to sex researchers, it’s also a grossly misused term. If Jackson did fall outside the norm in his “erotic age orientation”—and we may never know if he did—he was almost certainly what’s called a hebephile, a newly proposed diagnostic classification in which people display a sexual preference for children at the cusp of puberty, between the ages of, roughly, 11 to 14 years of age. Pedophiles, in contrast, show a sexual preference for clearly prepubescent children. There are also ephebophiles (from ephebos, meaning “one arrived at puberty” in Greek), who are mostly attracted to 15- to 16-year-olds; teleiophiles (from teleios, meaning, “full grown” in Greek), who prefer those 17 years of age or older); and even the very rare gerontophile (from gerontos, meaning “old man” in Greek), someone whose sexual preference is for the elderly. So although child sex offenders are often lumped into the single classification of pedophilia, biologically speaking it’s a rather complicated affair. Some have even proposed an additional subcategory of pedophilia, “infantophilia,” to distinguish those individuals most intensely attracted to children below six years of age.Based on this classification scheme of erotic age orientations, even the world’s best-known fictitious “pedophile,” Humbert Humbert from Nabokov’s masterpiece, Lolita, would more properly be considered a hebephile. (Likewise the protagonist from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, a work that I’ve always viewed as something of the “gay Lolita”). Consider Humbert’s telltale description of a “nymphet.” After a brief introduction to those “pale pubescent girls with matted eyelashes,” Humbert explains:

Between the age limits of nine and fourteen there occur maidens who, to certain bewitched travelers, twice or many times older than they, reveal their true nature which is not human, but nymphic (that is, demoniac); and these chosen creatures I propose to designate as “nymphets.”

Although Michael Jackson might have suffered more disgrace from his hebephilic orientation than most, and his name will probably forever be entangled darkly with the sinister phrase “little boys,” he wasn’t the first celebrity or famous figure that could be seen as falling into this hebephilic category. In fact, ironically, Michael Jackson’s first wife, Lisa Marie Presley, is the

product of a hebephilic attraction. After all, let’s not forget that Priscilla caught Elvis’s very grownup eye when she was just fourteen, only a year or two older than the boys that Michael Jackson was accused of sexually molesting. Then there’s of course also the scandalous Jerry Lee Lewis incident in which the 23-year-old “Great Balls of Fire” singer married his 13-year-old first cousin.
In the psychiatric community, there’s recently been a hubbub of commotion concerning whether hebephelia should be designated as a medical disorder or, instead, seen simply as a normal variant of sexual orientation and not indicative of brain pathology. There are important policy implications of adding hebephilia to the checklist of mental illnesses, since doing so might allow people who sexually abuse pubescent children to invoke a mental illness defense.

One researcher who is arguing vociferously for the inclusion of hebephilia in the American Psychiatric Association's revised diagnostic manual (the DSM-V) is University of Toronto psychologist Ray Blanchard. In last month’s issue of Archives of Sexual Behavior, Blanchard and his colleagues provide new evidence that many people diagnosed under the traditional label of pedophilia are in fact not as interested in prepubescent children as they are early adolescents.
To tease apart these erotic age orientation differences, Blanchard and his colleagues studied 881 men (straight and gay) in his laboratory using phallometric testing (also known as penile plethysmography) while showing them visual images of differently aged nude models. Because this technique measures penile blood volume changes, it’s seen as being a fairly objective index of sexual arousal to what’s being shown on the screen—which, for those attracted to children and young adolescents, the participant might verbally deny being attracted to. In other words, the penis isn’t a very good liar. So, for example, in Blanchard’s study, the image of a naked 12-year-old girl (nothing prurient, but rather resembling a subject in a medical textbook) was accompanied by the following audiotaped narrative:
“You are watching a late movie on TV with your neighbors’ 12-year-old daughter. You have your arm around her shoulders, and your fingers brush against her chest. You realize that her breasts have begun to develop…”
Blanchard and his coauthors found that the men in their sample fell into somewhat discrete categories of erotic age orientation—some had the strongest penile response to the prepubescent children (the pedophiles), others to the pubescent children (the hebephiles), and the remainder to the adults shown on screen (the teleiophiles). These categories weren’t mutually exclusive. For example, some teleiophiles showed some arousal to pubescent children, some hebephiles showed some attraction to prepubescent children, and so on. But the authors did find that it’s possible to distinguish empirically between a “true pedophile” and a hebephile using this technique, in terms of the age ranges for which men exhibited their strongest arousal. They also conclude that, based on the findings from this study, hebephilia “is relatively common compared with other forms of erotic interest in children.”
In the second half of their article, Blanchard and his colleagues argue that hebephilia should be added to the newly revised DSM-V as a genuine paraphilic mental disorder—differentiating it from pedophilia. But many of his colleagues working in this area are strongly opposed to doing this.
Men who find themselves primarily attracted to young or middle-aged adolescents are clearly disadvantaged in today’s society, but historically (and evolutionarily) this almost certainly wasn’t the case. In fact, hebephiles—or at least ephebephiles—would have had a leg up over their competition. Evolutionary psychologists have found repeatedly that markers of youth correlate highly with perceptions of beauty and attractiveness. For straight men, this makes sense, since a woman’s reproductive value declines steadily after the age of about twenty. Obviously having sex with a prepubescent child would be fruitless—literally. But, whether we like it or not, this isn’t so for a teenage girl who has just come of age, who is reproductively viable and whose brand-new state of fertility can more or less ensure paternity for the male. These evolved motives were portrayed in the film Pretty Baby, in which a young Brooke Shields plays the role of twelve-old-old Violet Neil, a prostitute’s daughter in 1917’s New Orleans whose coveted virginity goes up for auction to the highest bidder.

Understanding adult gay men’s attraction to young males is more of a puzzle. Evolutionary psychologist Frank Muscarella’s “alliance formation theory” is the only one that I’m aware of that attempts to do this. This theory holds that homoerotic behavior between older, high status men and teenage boys serves as a way for the latter to move up in ranks, a sort of power-for-sex bargaining chip. The most obvious example of this type of homosexual dynamic was found in ancient Greece, but male relationships in a handful of New Guinea tribes display these homoerotic patterns as well. There are also, ahem, plenty of present-day examples of this in Congress. Oscar Wilde probably would have signed on to this theoretical perspective. After all, his famous “love that dare not speak its name” wasn’t homosexuality, per se, but rather a “great affection of an elder for a younger man”:
...as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo… It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so, the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
But, generally speaking, Muscarella’s theory doesn’t seem to pull a lot of weight. Not many teenage boys in any culture seem terribly interested in taking this particular route to success. Rather—and I may be wrong about this—but I think most teenage boys would prefer to scrub toilets for the rest of their lives or sell soft bagels at the mall than become the sexual plaything of an “older gentlemen.”
In any event, given the biological (even adaptive) verities of being attracted to adolescents, most experts in this area find it completely illogical for Blanchard to recommend adding hebephilia to the revised DSM-V. (Especially since other more clearly maladaptive paraphilias—such as gerontophilia, in which men are attracted primarily to elderly, post-menopausal women—are not presently included in the diagnostic manual.) The push to pathologize hebephilia, argues forensic psychologist Karen Franklin, appears to be motivated more by “a booming cottage industry” in forensic psychology, not coincidentally linked with a “punitive era of moral panic." Because “civil incapacitation” (basically, the government’s ability to strip a person of his or her civil rights in the interests of public safety) requires that the person be suffering from a diagnosable mental disorder or abnormality, Franklin calls Blanchard’s proposal “a textbook example of subjective values masquerading as science.” Another critic, forensic psychologist Gregory DeClue, suggests that such medical classifications are being based on arbitrary distinctions dictated by cultural standards:
Pedophilia is a mental disorder. Homosexuality is not. Should hebephilia of ephebophilia or gerontophilia be considered mental disorders? How about sexual preference for people with different (or with the same) ethnic characteristics as oneself?
And Marquette University psychologist Thomas Zander, points out that since chronological age doesn’t always perfectly match physical age, including these subtle shades of erotic age preferences would be problematic from a diagnostic perspective:
Imagine how much more impractical it would be to require forensic evaluators to determine the existence of pedophilia based on the stage of adolescence of the examinee’s victim. Such determinations could literally devolve into a splitting of pubic hairs.

One unexplored question, and one inseparable from the case of Michael Jackson, is whether we tend to be more forgiving of a person’s sexual peccadilloes when that individual has some invaluable or culturally irreplaceable abilities. For example, consider the following true story:
There once was a man who fancied young boys. Being that laws were more lax in other nations, this man decided to travel to a foreign country, leaving his wife and young daughter behind, where he met up with another Westerner who shared in his predilections for pederasty, and there the two of them spent their happy vacation scouring the seedy underground of this country searching for pimps and renting out boys for sex.
Now if you’re like most people, you’re probably experiencing a shiver of disgust and a spark of rage. You likely feel these men should have their testicles drawn and quartered by wild mares, be thrown to a burly group of rapists, castrated with garden sheers or, if you’re the pragmatic sort, treated as any other sick animal in the herd would be treated, with a humane bullet to the temple or perhaps a swift and sure current of potassium chloride injected into the arm.
But notice the subtle change in your perceptions when I tell you that these events are from the autobiography of André Gide, who in 1947—long after he’d publicized these very details—won the Nobel prize in literature. Gide is in fact bowdlerizing his time in Algiers with none other than Oscar Wilde.
Wilde took a key out of his pocket and showed me into a tiny apartment of two rooms… The youths followed him, each of them wrapped in a burnous that hid his face. Then the guide left us and Wilde sent me into the further room with little Mohammed and shut himself up in the other with the [other boy]. Every time since then that I have sought after pleasure, it is the memory of that night I have pursued.
It’s not that we think it’s perfectly fine for Gide and Wilde to have sex with minors or even that they shouldn’t have been punished for such behaviors. (In fact Wilde was sentenced in London to two years hard labor for related offenses not long after this Maghreb excursion with Gide and died in penniless ignominy.) But somehow, as with our commingled feelings for Michael Jackson, “the greatest entertainer of all time,” the fact that these men were national treasures somehow dilutes our moralistic anger, as though we’re more willing to suffer their vices given the remarkable literary gifts they bestowed.
Would you really have wanted Oscar Wilde euthanized as though he were a sick animal? Should André Gide, whom the New York Times hailed in their obituary as a man “judged the greatest French writer of this century by the literary cognoscenti,” have been deprived of his pen, torn to pieces by illiterate thugs? It’s complicated. And although in principle we know that all men are equal in the eyes of the law, just as we did for Michael Jackson during his child molestation trials, I have a hunch that many people tend to feel (and uncomfortably so) a little sympathy for the Devil under such circumstances.
In this column presented by Scientific American Mind magazine, research psychologist Jesse Bering of Queen's University Belfast ponders some of the more obscure aspects of everyday human behavior. Ever wonder why yawning is contagious, why we point with our index fingers instead of our thumbs or whether being breastfed as an infant influences your sexual preferences as an adult? Get a closer look at the latest data as “Bering in Mind” tackles these and other quirky questions about human nature. Sign up for the RSS feed or friend Dr. Bering on Facebook and never miss an installment again.

Correction (posted 7/2/09): When this story was originally posted, we incorrectly stated that the DSM-IV is published by the American Psychological Association, rather than the American Psychiatric Association. Scientific American regrets the error.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR(S)Jesse Bering is director of the Institute of Cognition and Culture at Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland, where he studies how the evolved human mind plays a part in various aspects of social behavior. His new book, Under God's Skin, is forthcoming from W. W. Norton in spring 2010.

Second Life Data Offers Window Into How Trends Spread

2009-07-02T22:36:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (July 3, 2009) — Do friends wear the same style of shoe or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, which is why they became friends in the first place? Or once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt like behaviors?

Social scientists don't know for sure. They're still trying to understand the role social influence plays in the spreading of trends because the real world doesn't keep track of how people acquire new items or preferences.
But the virtual world Second Life does. Researchers from the University of Michigan have taken advantage of this unique information to study how "gestures" make their way through this online community. Gestures are code snippets that Second Life avatars must acquire in order to make motions such as dancing, waving or chanting.
Roughly half of the gestures the researchers studied made their way through the virtual world friend by friend.
"We could have found that most everyone goes to the store to buy gestures, but it turns out about 50 percent of gesture transfers are between people who have declared themselves friends. The social networks played a major role in the distribution of these assets," said Lada Adamic, an assistant professor in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Adamic is an author of a paper on the research that graduate student Eytan Bakshy will present on July 7 at the Association for Computer Machinery's Conference on Electronic Conference in Stanford, Calif. Bakshy is a doctoral student in the School of Information.
"There's been a high correspondence between the real world and virtual worlds," Adamic said. "We're not saying this is exactly how people share in the real world, but we believe it does have some relevance."
This study is one of the first to model social influence in a virtual world because of the rarity of having access to information about how information, assets or ideas propagate. In Second Life, the previous owner of a gesture is listed.
The researchers also found that the gestures that spread from friend to friend were not distributed as broadly as ones that were distributed outside of the social network, such as those acquired in stores or as give-aways.
And they discovered that the early adopters of gestures who are among the first 5-10 percent to acquire new assets are not the same as the influencers, who tend to distribute them most broadly. This aligns with what social scientists have found.
"In our study, we sought to develop a more rigorous understanding of social processes that underlies many cultural and economic phenomena," Bakshy said. "While some of our findings may seem quite intuitive, what I find most exciting is that we were actually able to test some rather controversial and competing hypotheses about the role of social networks in influence."
The researchers examined 130 days worth of gesture transfers in late 2008 and early 2009. They looked at 100,229 users and 106,499 gestures. They obtained the data from Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life. Personally-identifying information had been removed.
The research is funded by the National Science Foundation. The paper, "Social Influence and the Diffusion of User-Created Content," is authored by Eytan Bakshy, Brian Karrer and Lada A. Adamic.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Michigan.

Less Empathy Toward Outsiders: Brain Differences Reinforce Preferences For Those In Same Social Group

2009-07-01T12:27:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (July 1, 2009) — An observer feels more empathy for someone in pain when that person is in the same social group, according to new research in the July 1 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

The study shows that perceiving others in pain activates a part of the brain associated with empathy and emotion more if the observer and the observed are the same race. The findings may show that unconscious prejudices against outside groups exist at a basic level.
The study confirms an in-group bias in empathic feelings, something that has long been known but never before confirmed by neuroimaging technology. Researchers have explored group bias since the 1950s. In some studies, even people with similar backgrounds arbitrarily assigned to different groups preferred members of their own group to those of others. This new study shows those feelings of bias are also reflected in brain activity.
"Our findings have significant implications for understanding real-life social behaviors and social interactions," said Shihui Han, PhD, at Peking University in China, one of the study authors.
Other recent brain imaging studies show that feeling empathy for others in pain stimulates a brain area called the anterior cingulate cortex. Building on these results, the study authors tested the theory that these empathic feelings increase for members of the same social group. In this case, the researchers chose race as the social group, although the same effect may occur with other groups.
The researchers scanned brains areas in one Caucasian group and one Chinese group. The authors monitored participants as they viewed video clips that simulated either a painful needle prick or a non-painful cotton swab touch to a Caucasian or Chinese face. When painful simulations were applied to individuals of the same race as the observers, the empathic neural responses increased; however, responses increased to a lesser extent when participants viewed the faces of the other group.
Martha Farah, PhD, at the University of Pennsylvania, a cognitive neuroscientist and neuroethicist who was not affiliated with the study, says learning how empathic responses influence our behavior in many different situations is interesting both practically and theoretically. "This is a fascinating study of a phenomenon with important social implications for everything from medical care to charitable giving," she said.
But the finding raises as many questions as it answers, Farah said. "For example, is it racial identity per se that determines the brain's empathic response, or some more general measure of similarity between self and other?" she said. "What personal characteristics or life experiences influence the disparity in empathic response toward in-group and out-group members?"
The research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Adapted from materials provided by Society for Neuroscience, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Rating Attractiveness: Consensus Among Men, Not Women, Study Finds

2009-06-27T00:26:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (June 27, 2009) — Hot or not? Men agree on the answer. Women don't.

There is much more consensus among men about whom they find attractive than there is among women, according to a new study by Wake Forest University psychologist Dustin Wood.
The study, co-authored by Claudia Brumbaugh of Queens College, appears in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
"Men agree a lot more about who they find attractive and unattractive than women agree about who they find attractive and unattractive," says Wood, assistant professor of psychology. "This study shows we can quantify the extent to which men agree about which women are attractive and vice versa."
More than 4,000 participants in the study rated photographs of men and women (ages 18-25) for attractiveness on a 10-point scale ranging from "not at all" to "very." In exchange for their participation, raters were told what characteristics they found attractive compared with the average person. The raters ranged in age from 18 to more than 70.
Before the participants judged the photographs for attractiveness, the members of the research team rated the images for how seductive, confident, thin, sensitive, stylish, curvaceous (women), muscular (men), traditional, masculine/feminine, classy, well-groomed, or upbeat the people looked.
Breaking out these factors helped the researchers figure out what common characteristics appealed most to women and men.
Men's judgments of women's attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all.
"As far as we know, this is the first study to investigate whether there are differences in the level of consensus male and female raters have in their attractiveness judgments," Wood says. "These differences have implications for the different experiences and strategies that could be expected for men and women in the dating marketplace."
For example, women may encounter less competition from other women for the men they find attractive, he says. Men may need to invest more time and energy in attracting and then guarding their mates from other potential suitors, given that the mates they judge attractive are likely to be found attractive by many other men.
Wood says the study results have implications for eating disorders and how expectations regarding attractiveness affect behavior.
"The study helps explain why women experience stronger norms than men to obtain or maintain certain physical characteristics," he says. "Women who are trying to impress men are likely to be found much more attractive if they meet certain physical standards, and much less if they don't. Although men are rated as more attractive by women when they meet these physical appearance standards too, their overall judged attractiveness isn't as tightly linked to their physical features."
The age of the participants also played a role in attractiveness ratings. Older participants were more likely to find people attractive if they were smiling.
Adapted from materials provided by Wake Forest University.

Some Video Games Can Make Children Kinder And More Likely To Help

2009-06-19T03:15:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (June 18, 2009) — Some video games can make children kinder and more likely to help—not hurt—other people.

That's the conclusion of new research published in the June 2009 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.
The article presents the findings of three separate studies, conducted in different countries with different age groups, and using different scientific approaches. All the studies find that playing games with prosocial content causes players to be more helpful to others after the game is over.
The report is co-authored by a consortium of researchers from the United States, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia.
"Dozens of studies have documented a relationship between violent video games and aggressive behaviors," said lead author Douglas Gentile, an Iowa State University psychologist. "But this is one of the first that has documented the positive effects of playing prosocial games."
Prosocial video games involve characters who help and support each other in nonviolent ways.
"These studies show the same kind of impact on three different age groups from three very different cultures," said Brad Bushman, a University of Michigan co-author of the report. "In addition, the studies use different analytic approaches—correlational, longitudinal and experimental. The resulting triangulation of evidence provides the strongest possible proof that the findings are both valid and generalizable."
"These studies document that children and adolescents learn from practicing behaviors in games," said Rowell Huesmann, a U-M co-author of the report.
One study examined the link between video game habits and prosocial behavior among 727 secondary students in Singapore, with a mean age of 13. Students listed their favorite games and rated how often game characters helped, hurt or killed other characters. They also answered questions about how likely they were to spend time and money helping people in need, to cooperate with others and share their belongings, and to react aggressively in various situations.
As in numerous other studies, the researchers found a strong correlation between playing violent video games and hurting others. But the study also found a strong correlation between playing prosocial games and helping others.
The second study analyzed the long-term connection between video game habits and prosocial behavior in nearly 2,000 Japanese children ages 10 to 16. Participants completed a survey about their exposure to prosocial video games, and rated how often they had helped other people in the last month. Three to four months later, they were surveyed again, and researchers found a significant connection between exposure to prosocial games and helpful behavior months later.
"This suggests there is an upward spiral of prosocial gaming and helpful behavior, in contrast to the downward spiral that occurs with violent video gaming and aggressive behavior," said Bushman, a professor of communications and psychology and a research professor at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).
For the third study, the researchers carried out an experiment with 161 U.S. college students, with a mean age of 19. After playing either a prosocial, violent, or neutral game, participants were asked to assign puzzles to a randomly selected partner. They could choose from puzzles that were easy, medium or hard to complete. Their partner could win $10 if they solved all the puzzles. Those who played a prosocial game were considerably more helpful than others, assigning more easy puzzles to their partners. And those who had played violent games were significantly more likely to assign the hardest puzzles.
"Taken together, these findings make it clear that playing video games is not in itself good or bad for children," Bushman said."The type of content in the game has a bigger impact than the overall amount of time spent playing."
Adapted from materials provided by University of Michigan.

Be Your Best Friend If You'll Be Mine: Alliance Hypothesis For Human Friendship

2009-06-05T07:34:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (June 5, 2009) — University of Pennsylvania psychologists studying the cognitive mechanisms behind human friendship have determined that how you rank your best friends is closely related to how you think your friends rank you. The results are consistent with a new theory called the Alliance Hypothesis for Human Friendship, distinct from traditional explanations for human friendship that focused on wealth, popularity or similarity.

The study, performed by Penn cognitive psychologists Peter DeScioli and Robert Kurzban, has demonstrated that human friendship is caused, in part, by cognitive mechanisms aimed at creating a ready-made support group for potential conflicts. People call on friends for help in a variety of disputes, ranging from trivial arguments to violent fights. This study suggests that people have specialized decision processes that prioritize those individuals who tend to be most helpful in conflicts, those with fewer stronger commitments to others.
Researchers performed question-and-answer studies in which participants ranked their closest friends in a number of ways, including, for example, the benefits they receive from the friendship, the number of secrets shared and how long the friendship has been ongoing. Each time, whether participants were an online community, random passersby on a metropolitan street or undergraduate students in a laboratory, friendship rankings were most strongly correlated with individuals' own perceived rank among their partners' other friends.
"Historically, the main theory has been that humans build friendships in order to trade in goods and services," DeScioli, lead author, said. "The problem we focused on was that friendship involves more than exchange. People want friends who care about them and do not give just to get something back in return. We thought that theories about alliances might help explain why friends are primarily concerned with each others' needs rather than the benefits they can get in return for helping."
Traditional evolutionary approaches to explain human friendship apply the Theory of Reciprocal Altruism: Friends function as exchange partners; however, a wealth of empirical evidence from social psychology is inconsistent with the theory. For example, in prior studies it was shown that people do not keep regular tabs on the benefits given and received in close relationships. Also, people seem to help friends even when they are unlikely to be capable of repayment. For cognitive psychologists, it is unclear what humans and their complex brains are up to in creating these relationships.
The new Penn theory has origins in models of alliance building between nations, which prepare for conflict in advance but may not expect anything in return immediately.
"Friendships are about alliances," Kurzban, an associate professor, said. "We live in a world where conflict can arise and allies must be in position beforehand. This new hypothesis takes into account how we value those alliances. In a way, one of the main predictors of friendship is the value of the alliance. The value of an ally, or friend, drops with every additional alliance they must make, so the best alliance is one in which your ally ranks you above everyone else as well."
In short, the hypothesis is much more optimistic about the reasons for friendship than existing theories which point toward popularity, wealth and proximity as reasons for friendship.
"In this hypothesis," Kurzban said, "it's not what you can do for me, it's how much you like me. In this manner even the weakest nations, for example, or the least popular kid at the party with nary an alliance in the room is set up to be paired with someone looking for a friend."
More darkly, the new model also serves as an explanation for some petty human behaviors not explained by traditional friendship theories. For example, the Alliance Hypothesis explains why people are extremely concerned with comparisons to others in their social circle. It also explains how jealousies and aggression can erupt among groups of friends as alliances are shifted and maintained.
If the Alliance Hypothesis for Human Friendship is correct, then theories about alliances from game theory and international relations might help us better understand friendship. These theories suggest that people in conflict would benefit strategically from ranking their friends, hiding their friend-rankings and ranking friends according to their own position in partners' rankings. To employ these tactics in their friendships, people need to gather and store information about their friends' other friendships. That is, they have to readily understand the social world not only from their own perspective but also from the perspectives of their friends.
Although friendship is a core element of human social life, its evolved functions have been difficult to understand. Human friendship occurs among individuals who are neither relatives nor mates, so the function of this cooperative behavior is not as clear as when reproduction or genetic relatives are involved. Similar relationships have been observed in non-human species -- hyenas use partners to gain access to carcasses and male dolphins employ "wingmen" to attain females for mating — and considerable progress has been made in understanding these non-human relationships. But the functions of human friendship have been more elusive.
The study, appearing in the current issue of the online journal Public Library of Science One, was conducted by DeScioli and Kurzban of the Department of Psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Penn.
It was supported by a fellowship from the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Pennsylvania, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Basket Weaving May Have Taught Humans To Count

2009-06-05T07:12:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (June 3, 2009) — Did animals teach us one of the oldest forms of human technology? Did this technology contribute to our ability to count? These are just two of the themes due to be explored at a conference on basketry at the University of East Anglia.

The event, which takes place today and tomorrow (June 5-6), is part of Beyond the Basket, a major new research project led by the university exploring the development and use of basketry in human culture over 10,000 years.
Basketry has been practised for millennia and ranges from mats for sitting on, containers and traps for hunting, to fencing and barriers for animals or land, partitions and walls - all of which have been central to culture.
Beyond the Basket is a two-and-a-half year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of its Beyond Text programme. The research will explore the role of basketry in human culture and focus on various parts of the world, both in the past and present, from Europe to Amazonia, central Africa and Papua New Guinea.
The aim is to identify the mechanical traditions of making and the ways in which basketry is implicated in wider patterns of understanding, for example the order of society or the design of the universe. It will also show the impact of woven forms on other media, such as pottery, painting, and stone sculpture and architecture, and look at the future of basketry and the solutions it could offer to current issues, whether technical or social.
Project leader Sandy Heslop, of the School of World Art and Museology at UEA, said: “Basketry is a worldwide technology and is the interaction between human ingenuity and the environment. It tends to make use of, and therefore has to be adapted to, local conditions in terms of resources and environment.
“Without basketry there would be no civilisations. You can’t bring thousands of people together unless you can supply them, you can’t bring in supplies to feed populations without containers. In the early days of civilisations these containers were basketry.
“We may think of baskets as humble, but other people and cultures don’t. They have been used for storage, for important religious and ceremonial processes, even for bodies in the form of coffins.”
It is about 10,000 years ago that evidence for basketry starts to appear in North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Today its uses and influences are still seen, from the bamboo scaffolding often used in Asia, to contemporary architecture, for example the ‘Boiler Suit’ - the name given to the ‘woven’ steel tiles encasing the boiler room at Guy’s Hospital in London.
Mr Heslop said: “Beyond its practical uses, basketry has arguably been even more influential on our lives, since it relies on the relationship of number, pattern and structure. It therefore provides a model for disciplines such as mathematics and engineering and for the organisation of social and political life.
“Given the range of uses of basketry the associations of the technology are very varied. Some are aggressive, others protective, some help create social hierarchies others are recreational.”
The conference, Beyond the Basket: Construction, Order and Understanding, will look at various themes including: design and production, environmental issues, commercial and historical perspectives, weaving in architecture, and the mathematics of basketry, as well as more anthropological and archaeological topics. Among the speakers will be experts from North and South America, as well as the UK.
Beyond the Basket will culminate in an exhibition and accompanying book in 2011. The exhibition will include ancient material recovered by excavation as well as more recent examples of basketry from around the world and will enable people to experience basketry directly.
For further information about Beyond the Basket and to view images visit http://projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/beyondthebasket
Adapted from materials provided by University of East Anglia, via AlphaGalileo.

High Population Density Triggers Cultural Explosions

2009-06-05T07:05:00.001-07:00

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ScienceDaily (June 5, 2009) — Increasing population density, rather than boosts in human brain power, appears to have catalysed the emergence of modern human behaviour, according to a new study by UCL (University College London) scientists published in the journal Science.

High population density leads to greater exchange of ideas and skills and prevents the loss of new innovations. It is this skill maintenance, combined with a greater probability of useful innovations, that led to modern human behaviour appearing at different times in different parts of the world.
In the study, the UCL team found that complex skills learnt across generations can only be maintained when there is a critical level of interaction between people. Using computer simulations of social learning, they showed that high and low-skilled groups could coexist over long periods of time and that the degree of skill they maintained depended on local population density or the degree of migration between them. Using genetic estimates of population size in the past, the team went on to show that density was similar in sub-Saharan Africa, Europe and the Middle-East when modern behaviour first appeared in each of these regions. The paper also points to evidence that population density would have dropped for climatic reasons at the time when modern human behaviour temporarily disappeared in sub-Saharan Africa.
Adam Powell, AHRC Centre for the Evolution of Cultural Diversity, says: "Our paper proposes a new model for why modern human behaviour started at different times in different regions of the world, why it disappeared in some places before coming back, and why in all cases it occurred more than 100,000 years after modern humans first appeared.
"By modern human behaviour, we mean a radical jump in technological and cultural complexity, which makes our species unique. This includes symbolic behavior, such as abstract and realistic art, and body decoration using threaded shell beads, ochre or tattoo kits; musical instruments; bone, antler and ivory artefacts; stone blades; and more sophisticated hunting and trapping technology, like bows, boomerangs and nets.
Professor Stephen Shennan, UCL Institute of Archaeology, says: "Modern humans have been around for at least 160,000 to 200,000 years but there is no archaeological evidence of any technology beyond basic stone tools until around 90,000 years ago. In Europe and western Asia this advanced technology and behaviour explodes around 45,000 years ago when humans arrive there, but doesn't appear in eastern and southern Asia and Australia until much later, despite a human presence. In sub-Saharan Africa the situation is more complex. Many of the features of modern human behaviour – including the first abstract art – are found some 90,000 years ago but then seem to disappear around 65,000 years ago, before re-emerging some 40,000 years ago.
"Scientists have offered many suggestions as to why these cultural explosions occurred where and when they did, including new mutations leading to better brains, advances in language, and expansions into new environments that required new technologies to survive. The problem is that none of these explanations can fully account for the appearance of modern human behaviour at different times in different places, or its temporary disappearance in sub-Saharan Africa."
Dr Mark Thomas, UCL Genetics, Evolution and Environment, says: "When we think of how we came to be the sophisticated creatures we are, we often imagine some sudden critical change, a bit like when the black monolith appears in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In reality, there is no evidence of a big change in our biological makeup when we started behaving in an intelligent way. Our model can explain this even if our mental capacities are the same today as they were when we first originated as a species some 200,000 years ago.
"Ironically, our finding that successful innovation depends less on how smart you are than how connected you are seems as relevant today as it was 90,000 years ago."
Journal reference:
Adam Powell, Stephen Shennan, and Mark G. Thomas. Late Pleistocene Demography and the Appearance of Modern Human Behavior. Science, 2009; 324 (5932): 1298 DOI: 10.1126/science.1170165
Adapted from materials provided by University College London, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Greenland's Constant Summer Sunlight Linked To Summer Suicide Spike

2009-05-10T00:04:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (May 10, 2009) — Suicide rates in Greenland increase during the summer, peaking in June. Researchers speculate that insomnia caused by incessant daylight may be to blame.

Karin Sparring Björkstén from the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, led a team of researchers who studied the seasonal variation of suicides in all of Greenland from 1968-2002. They found that there was a concentration of suicides in the summer months, and that this seasonal effect was especially pronounced in the North of the country – an area where the sun doesn't set between the end of April and the end of August.
Björkstén said, "In terms of seasonal light variation, Greenland is the most extreme human habitat. Greenland also has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. We found that suicides were almost exclusively violent and increased during periods of constant day. In the north of the country, 82% of the suicides occurred during the daylight months (including astronomical twilight)".
The researchers found that most suicides occurred in young men and that violent methods, such as shooting, hanging and jumping, accounted for 95% of all suicides. No seasonal variation in alcohol consumption was found.
The authors speculate that light-generated imbalances in turnover of the neurotransmitter serotonin may lead to increased impulsiveness that, in combination with lack of sleep, may explain the increased suicide rates in the summer. They said, "People living at high latitudes need extreme flexibility in light adaptation. During the long periods of constant light, it is crucial to keep some circadian rhythm to get enough sleep and sustain mental health. A weak serotonin system may cause difficulties in adaptation".
Björkstén concludes, "Light is just one of many factors in the complex tragedy of suicide, but this study shows that there is a possible relationship between the two."
Journal reference:
Karin S Björkstén, Daniel F Kripke and Peter Bjerregaard. Accentuation of suicides but not homicides with rising latitudes of Greenland in the sunny months. BMC Psychiatry, 2009; 9 (1): 20 DOI: 10.1186/1471-244X-9-20
Adapted from materials provided by BMC Psychiatry, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Babies Brainier Than Many Imagine

2009-05-08T00:48:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (May 7, 2009) — A new study from Northwestern University shows what many mothers already know: their babies are a lot smarter than others may realize.

Though only five months old, the study's cuties indicated through their curious stares that they could differentiate water in a glass from solid blue material that looked very much like water in a similar glass.
The finding that infants can distinguish between solids and liquids at such an early age builds upon a growing body of research that strongly suggests that babies are not blank slates who primarily depend on others for acquiring knowledge. That's a common assumption of researchers in the not too distant past.
"Rather, our research shows that babies are amazing little experimenters with innate knowledge," Susan Hespos said. "They're collecting data all the time."
Hespos, an assistant professor of psychology at Northwestern, is lead author of the study, which will appear in the May 2009 issue of Psychological Science.
In a test with one group of infants in the study, a researcher tilted a glass filled with blue water back and forth to emphasize the physical characteristics of the substance inside. Another group of babies looked at a glass filled with a blue solid resembling water, which also was moved back and forth to demonstrate its physical properties.
Next all the infants were presented with test trials that alternated between the liquid or solid being transferred between two glasses.
According to the well-established looking-time test, babies, like adults, look significantly longer at something that is new, unexpected or unpredictable.
The infants who in their first trials observed the blue water in the glass looked significantly longer at the blue solid, compared to the liquid test trials. The longer stares indicated the babies were having an "Aha!" moment, noticing the solid substance's difference from the liquid. The infants who in their first trials observed the blue solid in the glass showed the opposite pattern. They looked longer at the liquid, compared to the solid test trials.
"As capricious as it may sound, how long a baby looks at something is a strong indicator of what they know," Hespos said. "They are looking longer because they detect a change and want to know what is going on."
The five-month-old infants were able to discriminate a solid from a similar-looking liquid based on movement cues, or on how the substances poured or tumbled out of upended glasses.
In a second experiment, the babies also first saw either liquid or a similar-looking solid in a glass that was tipped back and forth. This time, both groups of infants next witnessed test trials in which a cylindrical pipe was lowered into either the liquid-filled glass or the solid-containing glass.
The outcomes were similar to those of the previous experiment. Infants who first observed the glass with the liquid looked longer in the subsequent test when the pipe was lowered onto the solid. Likewise, the infants who looked at the solid in their first trials stared longer when later the pipe was lowered into the liquid.
The motion cues led to distinct expectations about whether an object would pass through or remain on top of the liquid or solid, the Northwestern researchers noted.
"Together these experiments provide the earliest evidence that infants have expectations about the physical properties of liquids," the researchers concluded in the Psychological Science study.
Hespos primarily is interested in how the brain works, and, to that end, her research on babies' brand new, relatively uncomplicated brains provides invaluable insights. She also is doing optical imaging of babies' brains, in which the biological measures confirm behavioral findings.
"Our research on babies strongly suggests that right from the beginning babies are active learners," Hespos said. "It shows that we perceive the world in pretty much the same way from infancy throughout life, making fine adjustments along the way."
In addition to Hespos, the co-investigators of the Psychological Science study are Alissa Ferry, a graduate student, and Lance Rips, professor of psychology, at Northwestern.
Journal reference:
Hespos et al. Five-Month-Old Infants Have Different Expectations for Solids and Liquids. Psychological Science, 2009; 20 (5): 603 DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02331.x
Adapted from materials provided by Northwestern University.

For Your Health, Pick A Mate Who Is Conscientious And, Perhaps, Also Neurotic

2009-05-06T12:47:00.001-07:00

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ScienceDaily (May 6, 2009) — Conscientiousness is a good thing in a mate, researchers report, not just because it's easier to live with someone who washes the dishes without being asked, but also because having a conscientious partner may actually be good for one's health. Their study, of adults over age 50, also found that women, but not men, get an added health benefit when paired with someone who is conscientious and neurotic.

This is the first large-scale analysis of what the authors call the "compensatory conscientiousness effect," the boost in health reported by those with conscientious spouses or romantic partners. The study appears this month in Psychological Science.
"Highly conscientious people are more organized and responsible and tend to follow through with their obligations, to be more impulse controlled and to follow rules," said University of Illinois psychology professor Brent Roberts, who led the study. Highly neurotic people tend to be more moody and anxious, and to worry, he said.
Researchers have known since the early 1990s that people who are more conscientious tend to live longer than those who are less so. They are more likely to exercise, eat nutritious foods and adhere to vitamin or drug regimens, and are less likely to smoke, abuse drugs or take unwarranted risks, all of which may explain their better health. They also tend to have more stable relationships than people with low conscientiousness.
Most studies have found a very different outcome for people who are highly neurotic. They tend to report poorer health and less satisfying relationships.
Many studies focus on how specific personality traits may affect one's own health, Roberts said, but few have considered how one's personality can influence the health of another.
"There's been kind of an individualistic bias in personality research," he said. "But human beings are not islands. We are an incredibly interdependent species."
Roberts and his colleagues at the University of Illinois and the University of Michigan looked at the association of personality and self-reported health among more than 2,000 couples taking part in the Health and Retirement Study, a representative study of the U.S. population over age 50. The study asked participants to rate their own levels of neuroticism and conscientiousness and to answer questions about the quality of their health. Participants also filled out a questionnaire that asked them whether or not a health problem limited their ability to engage in a range of activities such as jogging one block, climbing a flight of stairs, shopping, dressing or bathing.
As other studies have found, the researchers found that those who described themselves as highly conscientious also reported better health and said they were more able to engage in a variety of physical activities than those who reported low conscientiousness.
For the first time, however, the researchers also found a significant, self-reported health benefit that accompanied marriage to a conscientious person, even among those who described themselves as highly conscientious.
"It appears that even if you are really highly conscientious, you can still benefit from a spouse's conscientiousness," Roberts said. "It makes sense that regardless of what your attributes are, if you have people in your social network that have resources, such as conscientiousness, that can always help."
A more unusual finding involved an added health benefit reported by women who were paired with highly conscientious men who were also highly neurotic, Roberts said. The same benefit was not seen in men with highly conscientious and neurotic female partners. While both men and women benefit from being paired with a conscientious mate, Roberts said, only the women saw a modest boost in their health from being with a man who was also neurotic.
"The effect here is not much larger than the effect of aspirin on cardiovascular health, which is a well-known small effect," he said.
Asked whether women looking for long-term mates should choose a man who is conscientious and neurotic over one who is simply conscientious, Roberts said, "I wouldn't recommend it."
Adapted from materials provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Why People Are Better At Lying Online Than Telling A Lie Face-to-face

2009-05-06T09:00:00.001-07:00

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ScienceDaily (May 5, 2009) — In the digital world, it’s easier to tell a lie and get away with it. That’s good news for liars, but not so good for anyone being deceived.

Michael Woodworth, a forensic psychologist at UBC Okanagan studying deception in computer-mediated environments, says offering up a fib in person might make you provide certain signals that you’re trying to deceive, but lying online avoids the physical cues that can give you away.
“When people are interacting face to face, there is something called the ‘motivational impairment effect,’ where your body will give off some cues as you become more nervous and there’s more at stake with your lie,” says Woodworth. “In a computer-mediated environment, the exact opposite occurs.”
The motivational enhancement effect – a term coined by Woodworth and colleague Jeff Hancock from Cornell University – describes how people motivated to lie in a computer-mediated environment are not only less likely to be detected, they are also actually better at being deceptive than people who are less motivated.
When telling a lie face-to-face, the higher the stakes of your deception, the more cues you may give out that you’re lying. So, what isn’t in a text message may have advantages for a would-be deceiver: text doesn’t transmit non-verbal cues such as vocal properties, physical gestures, and facial expressions.
Woodworth’s research is very timely as technology and deceptive practices converge.
“Deception is one of the most significant and pervasive social phenomena of our age,” says Woodworth. “On average, people tell one to two lies a day, and these lies range from the trivial to the more serious. Deception lies in communication between friends, family, colleagues and in power and politics.”
Woodworth began his exploration by looking at how to detect deception in face-to-face environments. But he soon recognized the invasion of information and communication technologies into nearly all aspects of our lives was an opportunity to study how technology affects “digital deception” – defined as any type of technologically mediated message transmitted to create a false belief in the receiver of the message.
“Given the prevalence of both deception and communication technology in our personal and professional lives, an important set of concerns have emerged about how technology affects digital deception,” says Woodworth. He points out a growing number of individuals are falling prey to deceptive practices and information received through computer mediated contexts such as the Internet
“By learning more about how various factors affect detecting deceit in online communication, our research will certainly have important implications in organizational contexts, both legal and illegal, in the political domain, and in family life as more and more children go online.”
Common threads detected in psychopath texts
Michael Woodworth’s research at UBC Okanagan goes beyond deception. He also studies the personality disorder of psychopathy, looking at what secrets can be gleaned from the language used by psychopaths who have killed.
After interviewing dozens of psychopaths and non-psychopaths convicted of murder, Woodworth and colleagues used electronic linguistics analysis to automatically process the interview transcripts, paying attention to the appearance of certain words, parts of speech (verbs, adjectives, nouns), and semantics – for example, looking at how often certain topics came up.
The results were revealing.
“In the transcripts of psychopathic offenders, we found twice as many terms related to eating, and 58 per cent more references to money,” says Woodworth. “And the psychopaths were significantly more likely to discuss both clothing and drinking while discussing their homicide, compared to non-psychopathic offenders.”
Woodworth has now teamed with noted forensic psychologist and deception researcher Stephen Porter, who joined UBC Okanagan from Dalhousie University last summer, and fellow forensic psychologist Jan Cioe to build a multi-disciplinary forensic science graduate program and research centre at UBC Okanagan.
Bringing together prominent forensic psychologists will benefit both the academic and wider communities, says Woodworth.
“In the back of my mind I’m always thinking ‘how is this going to potentially have some applied value?’ whether it be the community in general, or specifically for law enforcement, or by furthering our knowledge within a certain area,” he says. “All of these applications ultimately assist with both assessment and treatment.”
This research is supported by a grant of $87,055 from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council in Canada.
Adapted from materials provided by University of British Columbia. Original article written by Raina Ducklow and Bud Mortenson.

Children Bullied At School At High Risk Of Developing Psychotic Symptoms

2009-05-06T08:57:00.001-07:00

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ScienceDaily (May 5, 2009) — Children who are bullied at school over several years are up to four times more likely to develop psychotic-like symptoms by the time they reach early adolescence.

Researchers at the University of Warwick found children who suffered physical or emotional bullying were twice as likely to develop psychotic symptoms by early adolescence, compared to children who are not bullied. However, if they experienced sustained bullying over a number of years that risk increases up to four times.
The research team, led by Professor Dieter Wolke, Professor of Developmental Psychology, followed 6,437 children from birth to 13 years.
The children took part in annual face-to-face interviews, psychological and physical tests. Parents were also asked to complete questionnaires about their child’s development. When they reached 13 years of age they were interviewed about experiences of psychotic symptoms in the previous six months.
Psychotic symptoms include hallucinations, delusions such as being spied on or bizarre thoughts such as one’s thoughts are being broadcast.
Professor Wolke said: “Our research shows that being victimised can have serious effects on altering perception of the world, such as hallucinations, delusions or bizarre thoughts where the person’s insight into why this is happening is reduced.”
“This indicates that adverse social relationships with peers is a potent risk factor for developing psychotic symptoms in adolescence and may increase the risk of developing psychosis in adulthood.”
The researchers used data from the Avon Longtitudinal Study of Parents And Children (ALSPAC). Parents have completed regular postal questionnaires about all aspects of their child’s health and development since birth (Apr 1991- Dec 1992).
Since the children were 7 and a half they have attended annual assessment clinics where they took part in a range of face-to-face interviews, psychological and physical tests.
Chronic peer victimisation, where bullying had continued over a number of years, was found in 13.7% of children when interviewed at ages 8 and 10. Severe victimisation, where children are both physically and emotionally bullied, was reported by 5.2% of children at age 10.
Professor Wolke added: “All children have conflicts occasionally and teasing and play fighting occurs. Children learn from these conflicts of how to deal with this. When we talk about bullying victimisation it is repeated, systematic and an abuse of power with the intent to hurt. Children who become targets have less coping skills, show a clear reaction and have few friends who can help them.”
Journal reference:
Schreier et al. Prospective Study of Peer Victimization in Childhood and Psychotic Symptoms in a Nonclinical Population at Age 12 Years. Archives of General Psychiatry, 2009; 66 (5): 527 DOI: 10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2009.23
Adapted from materials provided by University of Warwick.

Early Word Recognition Is Key To Lifelong Reading Skills Says New Study

2009-05-06T08:54:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (May 6, 2009) — Children’s early reading experience is critical to the development of their lifelong reading skills a new study from the University of Leicester has discovered. It found that the age at which we learn words is key to understanding how people read later in life.
The study addresses a 20-year riddle: When researchers investigate reading behaviour in children they find different patterns. Some researchers have found children’s reading mimics that of adults, but others have seen a different pattern of reading behaviour. Psychologists have struggled for twenty years to offer a convincing explanation for why different studies looking at the same topic have found such different results.
Now research by Dr Tessa Webb in the School of Psychology at the University of Leicester sheds new light on the subject by taking into account the age at which words are learnt.
She said: “Children read differently from adults, but as they grow older, they develop the same reading patterns. When adults read words they learned when they were younger, they recognise them faster and more accurately than those they learned later in life.”
In her research children from three different school years read aloud common and rarely used words, with half of the words following spelling to sound rules and the other half not obeying them. Unlike previous studies, Dr Webb made sure her research considered word learning age as well.
She found that children in their first few years at school read the words differently from adults. However, by age 10, they were mimicking the reading pattern of adults. This suggests that the different pattern of results found in children compared to adults may be due to the fact that word learning age was not considered.
This led her to conclude that word learning age is a key aspect of reading that should not be left out of research, lest the results are unsound.
The results of this research could have implications in tackling reading-related disabilities, such as dyslexia, said Dr Webb.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Leicester.

Odor Matching: The Scent Of Internet Dating

2009-04-12T23:24:00.001-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Apr. 12, 2009) — Dating websites will soon be able to compare partners in terms of whether the personal body odour of the other party will be pleasant to them. This has a very serious biological background.

If the start-up company Basisnote get their way, we will soon not only be able to match looks and interests in the profile of a potential partner with our own preferences. Now even the individual smell of the other party can be recorded in the profile and then checked to see if it will be pleasant for us. Even before going on the first date.
“If everything fits, you have the same interests, lots to talk about, but you can’t stand their smell, then a love affair doesn’t stand a chance,” explains biologist August Hämmerli. He makes the online smell profile possible with his company Basisnote. The start-up from Bern has worked together with ETH to develop a fast test to determine your own body odour and enter it as a code in a database. If the flirt partner has also entered their smell profile, you can find out within seconds whether you would like their smell.
All of this works by taking a saliva test, which can be carried out easily at home. It works with a chromatographic process, similar to a pregnancy test. The result: a simple digital code, which can be entered into an online profile. All of this takes no longer than twenty minutes. Hämmerli continues: “Obviously, smell is by no means the only factor in choosing a partner. However, our test makes it a measurable component.” The company is developing the test together with Mathias Wegner, head assistant at the Paul Schmidt-Hempel chair at the Institute for Integrative Biology. The test will appear on the market this year in cooperation with an online dating provider.
Immunity check through the nose
This all sounds like another gag for online dating platforms. Far from it. According to an explanatory model by evolutionary biologists, there is a valid explanation for why our nose is so important when it comes to choosing our partner. It is not without reason that we have to literally be able to “stand the smell” of our partner, if we are to find them likeable or even more. Our nose has sensitive receptors. They probe whether the other party has as few similar genes to us as possible. The more varied the gene pools are, the higher the chance for healthy, strong offspring.
It has been a well-known fact for a long time that mice check their potential mating partners by smelling them. The fact that humans do the same on a subconscious level was first proven in the nineties by biologist Claus Wedekind at University of Bern. He let female students smell T-shirts that had been worn by male test persons. The women had to indicate the smell that they found to be the most pleasant. It was shown that they consistently chose the men whose immune system was most different from their own.
How does this work? Basisnote founder August Hämmerli explains: “The genes of the MHC, the Major Histocompatibility Complex, carry the instructions for important building blocks of the immune system, the MHC proteins.” These bind fragments of foreign proteins, for example following an infection, and pass them on to the body’s own defence cells, which initiate a defence reaction. The more different MHC molecules someone has, the more different pathogens his body can defend against. In humans, there are more than one hundred variations of each of the nine most important MHC genes. The more varied the MHC, the better the immune systems of the offspring will be armed. Hämmerli: “The specific body odour is marked by the MHC combination. It is transmitted in the bodily fluids and transformed into the body’s very own smell on the skin.” The stronger the difference in immune system between the potential partner and yourself, the more pleasant you will find their smell.
Test instead of a T-shirt
According to Hämmerli, Basisnote is really just applying Wedekind’s T-shirt study to a standardised test system. August Hämmerli is so convinced of the success of his idea that he gave up his position as scientist at ETH to found the company. The Bern-born man coordinates the interface between the interested firms and the research work at the ETH laboratories. Co-founder Dominic Senn is an economist and political scientist. He also worked as a scientist at ETH up to the founding of the company, and is now responsible for the development of the business as CEO. Physicist Manuel Kaegi, who is just finishing his dissertation at the laboratory for safety analysis at ETH, looks after the IT implementation at Basisnote and interfaces with existing online dating platforms.
For two-and-a-half years, the three men have collected development funds and worked intensively on the details of the product. Now all technical issues have been resolved and it only remains to define the most user-friendly application. They are also preparing the first scientific publications on the subject.
The negotiations with online dating platforms are in their final phase. Hämmerli is happy to say that there has been great interest. He is reluctant to reveal which partner search site will soon be featuring smell as a dating component. This will have to wait until the autumn.
Setting up their own partner search site is out of the question. Their plans for the future are along other lines: “There are so many interesting areas. Once all of this is up and running, we want to have a look at the perfume sector,” Hämmerli reveals.
Adapted from materials provided by ETH Zurich.

Dogs And 2-year-olds Share A Limited Ability To Understand Adult Pointing Gestures

2009-04-10T11:47:00.001-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Apr. 10, 2009) — Dogs and small children who share similar social environments appear to understand human gestures in comparable ways, according to Gabriella Lakatos from Eötvös University in Budapest, Hungary, and her team. Looking at how dogs and young children respond to adult pointing actions, Lakatos shows that 3-year-olds rely on the direction of the index finger to locate a hidden object, whereas 2-year-olds and dogs respond instead to the protruding body part, even if the index finger is pointing in the opposite direction.

It is widely accepted that in the course of domestication, dogs became predisposed to read human communication signals, including pointing, head turning and gazing. Furthermore, the social environment of human infants is often shared by pet dogs in the family, and therefore there are likely to be similarities in the social stimulation of both young children and dogs.
The authors carried out two studies in which they compared the performance of adult dogs and 2- and 3-year-old children - the period of human development during which children and dogs respond in similar ways. They investigated whether dogs and human children are able to generalize from familiar pointing gestures to unfamiliar ones and whether they understand the unfamiliar pointing actions as directional signals.
A total of fifteen dogs and thirteen 2-year-old and eleven 3-year-old children took part in the two studies. In the first study, the researchers used a combination of finger and elbow pointing gestures to help dogs locate hidden food and children a favorite toy. They found that dogs choose a direction for the reward on the basis of a body part that protrudes from the experimenter's silhouette, even when the index finger is pointing in a different direction. Like dogs, 2-year-olds did not understand the significance of the pointing index finger when it did not protrude from the silhouette. (In these cases, the elbow protruded in the opposite direction.) However, 3-year-olds responded successfully to all gestures.
In the second study, the researchers used unfamiliar pointing gestures with a combination of finger, leg and knee pointing. All children and the dogs understood the leg-pointing gestures but only 3-year-olds successfully responded to pointing with the knee.
The authors conclude that "protruding body parts provide the main cue for deducing directionality for 2-year-old children and dogs. The similar performance of these groups can be explained by parallels in their evolutionary history and their socialization in a human environment."
Journal reference:
Lakatos et al. A comparative approach to dogs’ (Canis familiaris) and human infants’ comprehension of various forms of pointing gestures. Animal Cognition, 2009; DOI: 10.1007/s10071-009-0221-4
Adapted from materials provided by Springer Science+Business Media, via AlphaGalileo.

Why We Have Difficulty Recognizing Faces In Photo Negatives

2009-03-26T02:40:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 25, 2009) — Humans excel at recognizing faces, but how we do this has been an abiding mystery in neuroscience and psychology. In an effort to explain our success in this area, researchers are taking a closer look at how and why we fail.

A new study from MIT looks at a particularly striking instance of failure: our impaired ability to recognize faces in photographic negatives. The study, which appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences this week, suggests that a large part of the answer might lie in the brain's reliance on a certain kind of image feature.
The work could potentially lead to computer vision systems, for settings as diverse as industrial quality control or object and face detection. On a different front, the results and methodologies could help researchers probe face-perception skills in children with autism, who are often reported to experience difficulties analyzing facial information.
Anyone who remembers the days before digital photography has probably noticed that it's much harder to identify people in photographic negatives than in normal photographs. "You have not taken away any information, but somehow these faces are much harder to recognize," says Pawan Sinha, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and senior author of the PNAS study.
Sinha has previously studied light and dark relationships between different parts of the face, and found that in nearly every normal lighting condition, a person's eyes appear darker than the forehead and cheeks. He theorized that photo negatives are hard to recognize because they disrupt these very strong regularities around the eyes.
To test this idea, Sinha and his colleagues asked subjects to identify photographs of famous people in not only positive and negative images, but also in a third type of image in which the celebrities' eyes were restored to their original levels of luminance, while the rest of the photo remained in negative.
Subjects had a much easier time recognizing these "contrast chimera" images. According to Sinha, that's because the light/dark relationships between the eyes and surrounding areas are the same as they would be in a normal image.
Similar contrast relationships can be found in other parts of the face, primarily the mouth, but those relationships are not as consistent. "The relationships around the eyes seem to be particularly significant," says Sinha.
Other studies have shown that people with autism tend to focus on the mouths of people they are looking at, rather than the eyes, so the new findings could help explain why autistic people have such difficulty recognizing faces, says Sinha.
The findings also suggest that neuronal responses in the brain may be based on these relationships between different parts of the face. The team found that when they scanned the brains of people performing the recognition task, regions associated with facial processing (the fusiform face areas) were far more active when looking at the contrast chimeras than when looking at pure negatives.
Other authors of the paper are Sharon Gilad of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel and MIT postdoctoral associate Ming Meng, both of whom contributed equally to the work..
The research was funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Jim and Marilyn Simons Foundation.
Adapted from materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Contrary To Widely Held Beliefs, Romance Can Last In Long-term Relationships, Say Researchers

2009-03-21T00:05:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 21, 2009) — Romance does not have to fizzle out in long-term relationships and progress into a companionship/friendship-type love, a new study has found. Romantic love can last a lifetime and lead to happier, healthier relationships.

"Many believe that romantic love is the same as passionate love," said lead researcher Bianca P. Acevedo, PhD, then at Stony Brook University (currently at University of California, Santa Barbara). "It isn't. Romantic love has the intensity, engagement and sexual chemistry that passionate love has, minus the obsessive component. Passionate or obsessive love includes feelings of uncertainty and anxiety. This kind of love helps drive the shorter relationships but not the longer ones."
These findings appear in the March issue of Review of General Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association.
Acevedo and co-researcher Arthur Aron, PhD, reviewed 25 studies with 6,070 individuals in short- and long-term relationships to find out whether romantic love is associated with more satisfaction. To determine this, they classified the relationships in each of the studies as romantic, passionate (romantic with obsession) or friendship-like love and categorized them as long- or short-term.
The researchers looked at 17 short-term relationship studies, which included 18- to 23-year-old college students who were single, dating or married, with the average relationship lasting less than four years. They also looked at 10 long-term relationship studies comprising middle-aged couples who were typically married 10 years or more. Two of the studies included both long- and short-term relationships in which it was possible to distinguish the two samples.
The review found that those who reported greater romantic love were more satisfied in both the short- and long-term relationships. Companion-like love was only moderately associated with satisfaction in both short- and long-term relationships. And those who reported greater passionate love in their relationships were more satisfied in the short term compared to the long term.
Couples who reported more satisfaction in their relationships also reported being happier and having higher self-esteem.
Feeling that a partner is "there for you" makes for a good relationship, Acevedo said, and facilitates feelings of romantic love. On the other hand, "feelings of insecurity are generally associated with lower satisfaction, and in some cases may spark conflict in the relationship. This can manifest into obsessive love," she said.
This discovery may change people's expectations of what they want in long-term relationships. According to the authors, companionship love, which is what many couples see as the natural progression of a successful relationship, may be an unnecessary compromise. "Couples should strive for love with all the trimmings," Acevedo said. "And couples who've been together a long time and wish to get back their romantic edge should know it is an attainable goal that, like most good things in life, requires energy and devotion."
Journal reference:
Bianca P. Acevedo and Arthur Aron. Does a long-term relationship kill romantic love? Review of General Psychology, 2009; 13 (1): 59 DOI: 10.1037/a0014226
Adapted from materials provided by American Psychological Association, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Stranger Knows Best: Other People Know More About What Will Make Us Happy Than We Do

2009-03-20T06:48:00.001-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 20, 2009) — Want to know what will make you happy? Then ask a total stranger -- or so says a new study from Harvard University, which shows that another person's experience is often more informative than your own best guess.

The study, which appears in the current issue of Science, was led by Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard and author of the 2007 bestseller "Stumbling on Happiness," along with Matthew Killingsworth and Rebecca Eyre, also of Harvard, and Timothy Wilson of the University of Virginia.
"If you want to know how much you will enjoy an experience, you are better off knowing how much someone else enjoyed it than knowing anything about the experience itself," says Gilbert. "Rather than closing our eyes and imagining the future, we should examine the experience of those who have been there."
Previous research in psychology, neuroscience, and behavioral economics has shown that people have difficulty predicting what they will like and how much they will like it, which leads them to make a wide variety of poor decisions. Interventions aimed at improving the accuracy with which people imagine future events have been generally unsuccessful.
So rather than trying to improve human imagination, Gilbert and his colleagues sought to eliminate it from the equation by asking people to predict how much they would enjoy a future event about which they knew absolutely nothing -- except how much a total stranger had enjoyed it. Amazingly enough, those people made extremely accurate predictions.
In one experiment, women predicted how much they would enjoy a "speed date" with a man. Some women read the man's personal profile and saw his photograph, and other women learned nothing whatsoever about the man, but did learn how much another woman (whom they had never met) had enjoyed dating him. Women who learned about a previous woman's experience did a much better job of predicting their own enjoyment of the speed date than did woman who studied the man's profile and photograph.
Interestingly, both groups of women mistakenly expected the profile and photo to lead to greater accuracy, and after the experiment was over both groups said they would strongly prefer to have the profile and photograph of their next date.
In the second experiment, two groups of participants were asked to predict how they would feel if they received negative personality feedback from a peer. Some participants were shown a complete written copy of the feedback. Other were shown nothing, and learned only how a total stranger had felt upon receiving the feedback. The latter group more accurately predicted their own reactions to the negative feedback. Once again, participants mistakenly guessed that a written copy of the feedback would be more informative than knowledge of a total stranger's experience.
"People do not realize what a powerful source of information another person's experience can be," says Gilbert, "because they mistakenly believe that everyone is remarkably different from everyone else. But the fact is that an alien who knew all the likes and dislikes of a single human being would know a great deal about the species. People believe that the best way to predict how happy they will be in the future is to know what their future holds, but what they should really want to know is how happy those who've been to the future actually turned out to be."
Gilbert's research was funded by the National Science Foundation.
Adapted from materials provided by Harvard University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Liking Sweets Makes Sense For Kids

2009-03-20T06:45:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 20, 2009) — As any parent knows, children love sweet-tasting foods. Now, new research from the University of Washington and the Monell Center indicates that this heightened liking for sweetness has a biological basis and is related to children's high growth rate.

"The relationship between sweet preference and growth makes intuitive sense because when growth is rapid, caloric demands increase. Children are programmed to like sweet taste because it fills a biological need by pushing them towards energy sources," said Monell geneticist Danielle Reed, PhD, one of the study authors.
Across cultures, children prefer higher levels of sweetness in their foods as compared to adults, a pattern that declines during adolescence. To explore the biological underpinnings of this shift, Reed and University of Washington researcher Susan Coldwell, PhD, looked at sweet preference and biological measures of growth and physical maturation in 143 children between the ages of 11 and 15.
The findings, reported in the journal Physiology & Behavior, suggest that children's heightened liking for sweet taste is related to their high growth rate and that sweet preferences decline as children's physical growth slows and eventually stops.
Based on the results of sensory taste tests, children were classified according to their sweet taste preference into a 'high preference' or 'low preference' group. Children in the 'low preference' group also had lower levels of a biomarker (type I collagen cross-linked N-teleopeptides; NTx) associated with bone growth in children and adolescents.
"This gives us the first link between sweet preference and biological need," said Reed. "When markers of bone growth decline as children age, so does their preference for highly sweet solutions."
Other biological factors associated with adolescence, such as puberty or sex hormone levels, were not associated with sweet preference.
"We now know that sweet preference is related to physical growth. The next step is to identify the growth-related factor that is signaling the brain to influence sweet preference," said study lead author Coldwell, Washington Dental Service Endowed Professor and Associate Professor of Dental Public Health Sciences at the University of Washington School of Dentistry.
The research was funded by a grant to the University of Washington from the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (National Institutes of Health).
Adapted from materials provided by Monell Chemical Senses Center, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Language Of Music Really Is Universal, Study Finds

2009-03-20T06:42:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 20, 2009) — Native African people who have never even listened to the radio before can nonetheless pick up on happy, sad, and fearful emotions in Western music, according to a new report published online on March 19th in Current Biology. The result shows that the expression of those three basic emotions in music can be universally recognized, the researchers said.

"These findings could explain why Western music has been so successful in global music distribution, even in music cultures that do not as strongly emphasize the role of emotional expression in their music," said Thomas Fritz of the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences.
The expression of emotions is a basic feature of Western music, and the capacity of music to convey emotional expressions is often regarded as a prerequisite to its appreciation in Western cultures, the researchers explained. In other musical traditions, however, music is often appreciated for other qualities, such as group coordination in rituals.
In the new study, Fritz, Stefan Koelsch, and their colleagues wanted to find out whether the emotional aspects of Western music could be appreciated by people who had no prior exposure to it. Previous studies had asked similar questions about people with little experience with a particular musical form, for instance Westerners listening to Hindustani music, they said. But to really get at musical universals requires participants who are completely naïve to Western music.
Fritz enlisted members of the Mafa, one of about 250 ethnic groups in Cameroon. He traveled to the extreme north of the Mandara mountain ranges, where they live, with a laptop and sun collector to supply electricity in his backpack.
Their studies showed that both Western and Mafa listeners, who had never before heard Western music, could recognize emotional expressions of happiness, sadness, and fear in the music more often than would be expected by chance. However, they report that the Mafa showed considerable variability in their performance, with two of twenty-one study participants performing at chance level.
Both groups relied on similar characteristics of music to make those calls; both Mafas and Westerners relied on temporal cues and on mode for their judgment of emotional expressions, although this pattern was more marked in Western listeners.
By manipulating music, the researchers also found that both Western listeners and African listeners find original music more pleasant than altered versions. That preference is probably explained in part by the increased sensory dissonance of the manipulated tunes.
"In conclusion," the researchers wrote, "both Mafa and Western listeners showed an ability to recognize the three basic emotional expressions tested in this study from Western music above chance level. This indicates that these emotional expressions conveyed by the Western musical excerpts can be universally recognized, similar to the largely universal recognition of human emotional facial expression and emotional prosody." Prosody refers to the rhythm, stress, and intonation of connected speech.
The authors include Thomas Fritz, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; Sebastian Jentschke, UCL Institute of Child Health, London, UK; Nathalie Gosselin, Universite´ de Montreal, Montreal, Canada; Daniela Sammler, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; Isabelle Peretz, Universite´ de Montreal, Montreal, Canada; Robert Turner, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; Angela D. Friederici, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany; and Stefan Koelsch, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany, University of Sussex, Falmer, UK.
Journal reference:
Thomas Fritz, Sebastian Jentschke, Nathalie Gosselin, Daniela Sammler, Isabelle Peretz, Robert Turner, Angela D. Friederici, Stefan Koelsch. Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music. Current Biology, 2009; DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.02.058
Adapted from materials provided by Cell Press, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Key To Happiness Is Gratitude, And Men May Be Locked Out

2009-03-18T13:41:00.001-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 19, 2009) — With Mother’s Day, Father’s Day and high school and college graduations upcoming, there will be plenty of gift-giving and well wishes. When those start pouring in, let yourself be grateful—it’s the best way to achieve happiness according to several new studies conducted by Todd Kashdan, associate professor of psychology at George Mason University.

Gratitude, the emotion of thankfulness and joy in response to receiving a gift, is one of the essential ingredients for living a good life, Kashdan says. Kashdan’s most recent paper, which was recently published online at the Journal of Personality, reveals that when it comes to achieving well-being, gender plays a role. He found that men are much less likely to feel and express gratitude than women.
“Previous studies on gratitude have suggested that there might be a difference in gender, and so we wanted to explore this further—and find out why. Even if it is a small effect, it could make a huge difference in the long run,” says Kashdan.
In one study, Kashdan interviewed college-aged students and older adults, asking them to describe and evaluate a recent episode in which they received a gift. He found that women compared with men reported feeling less burden and obligation and greater levels of gratitude when presented with gifts. In addition, older men reported greater negative emotions when the gift giver was another man.
“The way that we get socialized as children affects what we do with our emotions as adults,” says Kashdan. “Because men are generally taught to control and conceal their softer emotions, this may be limiting their well-being.”
As director of the Laboratory for the Study of Social Anxiety, Character Strengths, and Related Phenomena at Mason, Kashdan is interested in the assessment and cultivation of well-being, curiosity, gratitude and meaning and purpose in life. He has been active in the positive psychology movement since 2000, when he taught one of the first college courses on the science of happiness.
Kashdan says that if he had to name three elements that are essential for creating happiness and meaning in life it would be meaningful relationships, gratitude, and living in the present moment with an attitude of openness and curiosity. His book “Curious?,” which outlines ways people can enhance and maintain the various shades of well-being, is scheduled for release in April 2009 with HarperCollins.
Adapted from materials provided by George Mason University.

Writing After Terrorist Attack Has Positive Medium Term Effects

2009-03-18T10:50:00.001-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 18, 2009) — A new study has analysed the expressive writing of terrorism victims to analyse their psychosocial processes following the terrorist attacks in New York and Madrid. Despite the cultural differences of the people involved, the results show that the feelings and thoughts experienced following this type of traumatic event are universal.

The people who experienced the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and the March 11 2004 train attacks in Madrid needed to be able to express their feelings, thoughts and emotions. The aim of the study published in the International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology was to compare how people from both nations reacted to such violent acts through expressive writing.
"After the Madrid attacks we were unfortunate enough to be able to ask people who had lived through this experience, either directly or indirectly, what they thought and how they felt following the terrorist attacks," Itziar Fernández, the study's author and a professor at the National University of Distance Education (UNED), told SINC.
"Following the attacks, there was a great fear that people would be affected by post-traumatic stress disorder. In the end, however, although they were in shock, people were able to deal with had happened and adapt to the situation," says the researcher.
Based on the comments recorded by 325 people living in the United States and 333 in Spain, the researcher and her team looked into how both groups put their feelings and thoughts into words.
A linguistic analysis of the texts, carried out by using the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) programme, showed that the victims who benefited most from recording the traumatic events were those who use more cognitive words (introspective and causal ones), use a high number of positive emotional words, and changed the use of pronouns and references to themselves.
The results show that feelings about the events (anger, impotence, fear) were similar between the two countries during a period between the third and eighth weeks after the attacks, both inclusive.
However, the data collected does show a significant difference. "While the Americans had a more individualistic view of events, the Spaniards talked more about social processes." For example, there were not the same enormous public demonstrations following September 11 as there were following the attacks in Spain.
The study concludes that writing about a traumatic event can have positive effects over the medium term (from two months afterwards). Although the participants' symptoms worsened over the short term (relating an event makes people relive it, and worsens their negative emotions), they felt better and paid less visits to the doctor over the medium and long term.
The effect was the opposite in the case of excessive consumption of media coverage of such an event, however. Data about news consumption throughout the population following the attacks showed that, over the long term (two months after the Madrid attacks), people who were repetitively viewing images of the attacks felt worse than those who rarely watched the television.
Tackling post-traumatic stress
The benefits of talking about traumatic events forms part of cultural belief systems. Therapists always seek to make people reconstruct a narrative and a testimony about what has happened. They are asked to talk about their lives before the traumatic event, and to reconstruct images and their sensations and feelings in order to give them meaning (why and how the event took place).
The first studies of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were conducted following the Vietnam War (1958-1975). It is a psychological illness classified within the group of anxiety disorders, which arises as a result of exposure to a traumatic event involving physical harm.
PTSD, which is diagnosed two months after a stressful life event, is a severe emotional reaction. It is characterised by symptoms such as loss of appetite, sadness and disturbed sleep, and lasts for more than two months after the event.
Journal reference:
Itziar Fernández, Darío Páez y James W. Pennebaker. Comparison of expressive writing after the terrorist attacks of September 11th and March 11th. International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology, Vol. 9, Nº 1, pp.89-103, 2009
Adapted from materials provided by Plataforma SINC, via AlphaGalileo.

Strict Labor Market Regulation Increases Global Unemployment, Study Shows

2009-03-17T09:08:00.001-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 17, 2009) — Tight labour market regulation increases unemployment all over the world, finds a study of 73 countries by the University of Bath.

The study, published in the Journal of Comparative Economics, is one of the first to cover not only industrial countries but also developing and transition countries.
Based on data for the years 2000 to 2003, the findings suggest that if, for example, Italy (a typical country with strict regulation) had enjoyed the same flexibility in labour market regulation as the United States (a typical country with flexible regulation), its unemployment rate might have been 2.3 percentage points lower among the total labour force, 3.4 percentage points lower among women and 5.6 percentage points lower among young people.
“The adverse labour market effects are probably due to lower investment by domestic firms as well as lower foreign direct investment inflows caused by stricter labour market regulation.” said Dr Horst Feldmann, from the University’s Department of Economics & International Development, who carried out the research.
One area of labour market regulation that appears to have particularly adverse effects on unemployment are stringent hiring and firing rules, the study finds.
While strict hiring rules restrict temporary work agencies and the use of fixed-term contracts, tight firing rules make it difficult and costly for employers to lay off workers.
According to the findings, these rules, as well as strict labour market regulation in general, have a particularly adverse impact on women and young people.
Dr Feldmann explained: “Women often take a career break to have children and later on try to get back into employment. Young people are just entering working life.
“Therefore, it is plausible that both groups are more strongly affected when employers are reluctant to hire staff due to stringent labour market regulation.”
Another type of labour market regulation that appears to raise unemployment on a world-wide scale is military conscription, the study finds.
“A main reason may be that conscripts leaving the armed forces after the end of their service have difficulties finding a job because they did not gather the skills and work experience that employers are looking for.” said Dr Feldmann.
“The longer the conscription period, the more severe this mismatch is likely to be. According to my findings, this effect is the strongest among young people. This is obviously because conscripts typically are in this age group.
“This is the first time the effects of military conscription on the labour market have been analysed.”
Apart from the indicators that measure the strictness of hiring and firing regulation and the use of conscription, Dr Feldmann used indicators that measure the strictness of minimum wage laws, the centralisation of wage bargaining and the generosity of unemployment benefits.
His aggregate indicator measuring the overall strictness of labour market regulation is the average of these five individual indicators.
On average over the years 2000-2003, Italy’s flexibility of labour market regulation (as measured by the aggregate indicator) was rated 3.6 out of 10 - while the United States was rated 7.2 and the United Kingdom was rated 6.8.
Dr Feldmann said: “The research suggests that the UK’s fairly flexible labour market regulation is likely to strengthen the economy’s resilience to weather the current crisis.
“Although unemployment is going to rise sharply for some time, countries with more flexible regulation will probably experience a faster and more pronounced fall in unemployment once the crisis is overcome.”
Adapted from materials provided by University of Bath.

Parents Grossly Underestimate The Influence Their Children Wield Over In-Store Purchases

2009-03-16T23:49:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 17, 2009) — The influence children wield over their parents’ purchase decisions at the point of sale is grossly underestimated by parents. This was shown in a new study conducted by researchers at the University of Vienna, Austria.

According to the study by consumer researchers Claus Ebster and Udo Wagner, twice as many purchases in supermarkets are triggered by children than their parents are aware of.
"Most parents seem to be completely unaware of how much their little ones make them buy“, said Claus Ebster. 178 parents shopping with their child in Austrian supermarkets were unobtrusively observed while strolling through the aisles, after which they were interviewed.
When asked how many products their children had made them buy, on average parents only reported half the number of purchases that had been secretly observed. "Considering that the majority of purchase decisions in a supermarket are made in the store, neither retailers nor parents should underestimate the importance of child-induced purchase decisions", said Udo Wagner, professor of business administration of the University of Vienna.
The two researchers also investigated factors responsible for the number of purchase requests children make. It was found that children primarily request products that are placed at their eye-level, such as sweets and toys strategically positioned by retailers on the lower shelves. The best way for parents to reduce the number of purchase requests from their child is to seat the child in the shopping cart (facing the parent), thereby restricting the child’s field of view. According to Claus Ebster, "Children seated in a stroller are also less likely to bug their parents with purchase requests".
Furthermore, parents are more likely to yield to a child’s request if the product can be used or consumed in the store, such as toys, sweets and fruit, as it keeps the child busy during the shopping trip.
The researchers also have advice for children: Asking nicely pays off! Parents were considerably more willing to yield to a child’s request if asked clearly and politely rather than when a child either angrily demanded a product or stated the request rather weakly.
Journal reference:
Ebster et al. Children's influences on in-store purchases. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 2009; 16 (2): 145 DOI: 10.1016/j.jretconser.2008.11.005
Adapted from materials provided by University of Vienna.

Music Education Can Help Children Improve Reading Skills

2009-03-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2009) — Children exposed to a multi-year programme of music tuition involving training in increasingly complex rhythmic, tonal, and practical skills display superior cognitive performance in reading skills compared with their non-musically trained peers, according to a study published in the journal Psychology of Music.

According to authors Joseph M Piro and Camilo Ortiz from Long Island University, USA, data from this study will help to clarify the role of music study on cognition and shed light on the question of the potential of music to enhance school performance in language and literacy.
Studying children the two US elementary schools, one of which routinely trained children in music and one that did not, Piro and Ortiz aimed to investigate the hypothesis that children who have received keyboard instruction as part of a music curriculum increasing in difficulty over successive years would demonstrate significantly better performance on measures of vocabulary and verbal sequencing than students who did not receive keyboard instruction.
Several studies have reported positive associations between music education and increased abilities in non-musical (eg, linguistic, mathematical, and spatial) domains in children. The authors say there are similarities in the way that individuals interpret music and language and “because neural response to music is a widely distributed system within the brain…. it would not be unreasonable to expect that some processing networks for music and language behaviors, namely reading, located in both hemispheres of the brain would overlap.”
The aim of this study was to look at two specific reading subskills – vocabulary and verbal sequencing – which, according to the authors, are “are cornerstone components in the continuum of literacy development and a window into the subsequent successful acquisition of proficient reading and language skills such as decoding and reading comprehension.”
Using a quasi-experimental design, the investigators selected second-grade children from two school sites located in the same geographic vicinity and with similar demographic characteristics, to ensure the two groups of children were as similar as possible apart from their music experience.
Children in the intervention school (n=46) studied piano formally for a period of three consecutive years as part of a comprehensive instructional intervention program. Children attending the control school (n=57) received no formal musical training on any musical instrument and had never taken music lessons as part of their general school curriculum or in private study. Both schools followed comprehensive balanced literacy programmes that integrate skills of reading, writing, speaking and listening.
All participants were individually tested to assess their reading skills at the start and close of a standard 10-month school year using the Structure of Intellect (SOI) measure.
Results analysed at the end of the year showed that the music-learning group had significantly better vocabulary and verbal sequencing scores than did the non-music-learning control group. This finding, conclude the authors, provides evidence to support the increasingly common practice of “educators incorporating a variety of approaches, including music, in their teaching practice in continuing efforts to improve reading achievement in children”.
However, further interpretation of the results revealed some complexity within the overall outcomes. An interesting observation was that when the study began, the music-learning group had already experienced two years of piano lessons yet their reading scores were nearly identical to the control group at the start of the experiment.
So, ask the authors, “If the children receiving piano instruction already had two years of music involvement, why did they not significantly outscore the musically naïve students on both measures at the outset?” Addressing previous findings showing that music instruction has been demonstrated to exert cortical changes in certain cognitive areas such as spatial-temporal performance fairly quickly, Piro and Ortiz propose three factors to explain the lack of evidence of early benefit for music in the present study.
First, children were tested for their baseline reading skills at the beginning of the school year, after an extended holiday period. Perhaps the absence of any music instruction during a lengthy summer recess may have reversed any earlier temporary cortical reorganization experienced by students in the music group, a finding reported in other related research. Another explanation could be that the duration of music study required to improve reading and associated skills is fairly long, so the initial two years were not sufficient.
A third explanation involves the specific developmental time period during which children were receiving the tuition. During the course of their third year of music lessons, the music-learning group was in second grade and approaching the age of seven. There is evidence that there are significant spurts of brain growth and gray matter distribution around this developmental period and, coupled with the increased complexity of the study matter in this year, brain changes that promote reading skills may have been more likely to accrue at this time than in the earlier two years.
“All of this adds a compelling layer of meaning to the experimental outcomes, perhaps signalling that decisions on ‘when’ to teach are at least as important as ‘what’ to teach when probing differential neural pathways and investigating their associative cognitive substrates,” note the authors.
“Study of how music may also assist cognitive development will help education practitioners go beyond the sometimes hazy and ill-defined ‘music makes you smarter’ claims and provide careful and credible instructional approaches that use the rich and complex conceptual structure of music and its transfer to other cognitive areas,” they conclude.
Journal reference:
Joseph M. Piro and Camilo Ortiz. The effect of piano lessons on the vocabulary and verbal sequencing skills of primary grade students. Journal Psychology of Music, 16th March 2009
Adapted from materials provided by SAGE Publications/Psychology of Music, via AlphaGalileo.

Nice Guys Can Finish First And So Can Their Teams

2009-03-16T03:15:00.000-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 16, 2009) — Ever thought the other guy was a loser for giving his all for the team even if others weren’t pulling their weight?

A new study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, says that person can influence a group to become more efficient in achieving its goals by making cooperative, collective behaviour seem acceptable and appropriate, and thereby encouraging others to act similarly.
The study, authored by a professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and his collaborator at Northwestern University, calls such individuals “consistent contributors” – people who contribute all the time, regardless of others’ choices.
The findings challenge assumptions made by many game and rational choice theorists that people should cooperate very little in situations with a known end-point when there are short-term incentives to act selfishly.
“It was generally accepted that the unconditional ‘always-cooperate’ strategy was a dumb strategy,” says Mark Weber, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour at Rotman who co-authored the paper with J. Keith Murnighan of the Kellogg School of Management. “The prevailing wisdom in some scholarly circles is that consistent contributors shouldn’t exist, that if they do they’re “suckers”, and that people will exploit them.”
“But our study found consistently cooperative actors even in places you might least expect them, and when they’re there they seem to set a tone and shape how their fellow group members understand situations,” says Prof. Weber. “Their clear, consistent behavior elicits cooperation, and once you get a few people cooperating with each other, they seem to enjoy cooperating. Groups become more productive, more economically efficient and, anecdotally, people enjoy being a part of them more as a result.”
The paper re-analyzed data from two previous experiments by experimental economists and presented findings from two additional experiments. Participants were given endowments they could keep for themselves or contribute to the group, benefiting everyone. Taken together, the experiments found consistent cooperators commonly emerged, benefited from rather than suffered from their risky actions, and members of their groups cooperated more often than those in groups containing more “rational”actors.
“When you join a new group you have a strategic choice to make – are you going to be a consistent contributor or risk being in a group without one?” says Weber. “Our findings should remind people that they can have a big effect on the groups with which they interact.”
Journal reference:
J. Mark Weber, J. Keith Murnighan. Suckers or Saviors? Consistent Contributors in Social Dilemmas. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2008, Vol. 95, No. 6, 1340 %u20131353 0022-3514/08/ DOI: 10.1037/a0013326
Adapted from materials provided by University of Toronto.

Your Looks, Creditworthiness May Go Hand In Hand, At Least In The Eyes Of Some Lenders

2009-03-15T02:57:00.001-07:00

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ScienceDaily (Mar. 15, 2009) — New research suggests that a person’s appearance may play a role in whether they are deemed trustworthy by financial lenders. The study is summarized in a working paper by Jefferson Duarte at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Management and Stephan Siegel and Lance Young, both of the University of Washington.

The paper, “Trust and Credit,” found that borrowers on the peer-to-peer lending site Prosper.com who are perceived as trustworthy are more likely to have their loan requests granted. The research revealed that a seemingly untrustworthy person must promise to pay an interest rate almost 2 percent higher than those deemed trustworthy to have the same chance of getting a loan.
“We found that people take into account someone’s appearance when engaging in commercial transactions -- even in situations where a lot of information about the parties involved is available,” said Duarte, visiting associate professor in management at Rice.
Using Prosper.com loan data
Duarte and his colleagues looked at 6,821 loan applications submitted to the popular online peer-to-peer lending site Prosper.com, where people seeking loans are matched up with people willing to lend money. At Prosper.com, borrowers submit information such as their credit profile, job history, education level and income along with terms of a loan they wish to obtain. The borrowers may also supply photographs and a statement about why they are seeking a loan or its intended use. At that point, lenders look at the borrowers’ profiles. If lenders are interested in offering the borrower a loan, they place a bid for their business. If there are enough bids, the loan application is filled; otherwise, the loan application expires. Of the 6,821 applications used by the researchers, 733 became loans.
The researchers then turned to Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), a site that brings together people who need a task done with people seeking work. The research team supplied 25 MTurk “workers” with only the photographs of the borrowers and asked them to rate the borrowers' trustworthiness on a scale of 1 to 5. They were also asked to assess the probability that the person in the photograph would repay a $100 loan. With these responses, the researchers built a measure of trustworthiness based on the photographs.
Armed with the physiognomy-based trustworthiness measures, the team found that perceived trustworthiness of borrowers correlates with the ratings on their credit history filed at Prosper.com. That is, the MTurk workers could distinguish people with high credit scores from people with low credit scores based solely on the photographs.
The researchers also found that people perceived as trustworthy default on their loans less often, even after accounting for credit scores. "This implies that the pictures revealed something about borrower creditworthiness that is not accounted for in traditional credit scoring models," Duarte said.
Another finding: Lenders on Prosper.com use the information in the picture when deciding to make a loan -- even with all the information that is available about the borrower's credit history. People perceived as trustworthy get loans more often, even after accounting for traditional creditworthiness measures, such as credit scores.
Adapted from materials provided by Rice University.

Why Nations Fail To Act In The Face Of Genocide

2008-05-19T09:56:00.001-07:00

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080515145348.htm

ScienceDaily (May 19, 2008) — The international community should take formal steps to justify inaction when conditions of genocide exist anywhere in the world.

So says Paul Slovic, a University of Oregon psychology professor, who wants a formal process that requires nations to carefully weigh and publicly justify action or inaction in cases of intentional mass murder. "If they were required to deliberate, I think it would be much more difficult for nations not to take action," he says. "This is something nations aren't required to do and don't really do now."
Slovic, who is also the president and founder of Decision Research Inc., a think tank for risk assessment in Eugene, Ore., makes the recommendation May 18 at a seminar on the prevention of genocide in Auschwitz, Poland hosted by the Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation.
The formal steps proposed by Slovic result from his National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research on psychic numbing, which attempts to understand why people, who emotionally care for and respond to one person in need, tend to become emotionally numb to many people in need.
"Slovic uses scientific methods to help us understand the psychological underpinnings for the consistent failure of the world community to respond to genocides," says NSF Program Director for Decision, Risk and Management Sciences Bob O'Connor. "More importantly, his research suggests concrete steps that will help to change this tragic reality."
Slovic cites a 1948 United Nations convention that calls for the prevention of genocide as evidence of psychic numbing. The convention has rarely been invoked despite more than 135 signatories and a large number of mass murders since the end of World War II. Slovic urges a review of the convention.
The problem, according to Slovic, is that moral intuition, guided by feelings and emotions, is not sufficient to motivate action when genocide is happening. Both moral intuition and moral reasoning, that is, logical argument and calculation, are needed to stimulate action.
"Our basic way of responding through moral intuition is a problem because it breaks down in the face of large scale atrocities," says Slovic. "Our compassion, our empathy, our feeling about what we should do gives us a rush of immediate concern, but it doesn't sustain us when large numbers of people are involved."
The solution is to engage moral reasoning, a slower and more logical way of thinking about problems that challenge principles of right conduct, along with moral intuition.
For example, he argues that the U.S. government doesn't leave it to the moral intuition of citizens to determine how much money they should pay in taxes for Social Security. Instead, moral reasoning leads to laws that require individuals to pay specific amounts for this program.
"Moral reasoning says all human lives are equally valuable," says Slovic. "Given that, if a large number of lives are at risk, they should be proportionally more valuable than a single life. But if left to moral intuition, we would feel a certain amount of concern for the large number of lives at risk, but that feeling would not necessarily be enough to lead us to action."
A 2005 Israeli research study verifies his point that moral intuition, in the absence of moral reasoning, can lead to bad decisions. In the study, participants were shown photos of children in need. One photo showed eight children who needed a total of $300,000 in life-saving medical care. A second photo showed only one child who could be helped with $300,000. Participants were most willing to donate for one child's medical care, but the level of giving declined dramatically when donating to help the entire group.
Still, Slovic recognizes that in some instances, people act to help large numbers of people as was the case in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit the north-central Gulf Coast of the United States and in 2004, when devastating tsunamis slammed into 11 countries in South Asia.
"It was easier for people to have empathy in those cases," he says. "People could see vivid, descriptive images in the news and feel what it might be like if they themselves were in a similar circumstance."
But for cases of genocide, descriptive news media coverage doesn't always occur or prompt people and governments to intervene. The Tyndall Report, which monitors American television coverage, shows that NBC news allotted a total of five minutes to the Darfur genocide on its nightly newscasts in 2004; CBS had only three minutes, about one minute of coverage for every 100,000 deaths.
Slovic insists that we need to engage both moral intuition and moral reasoning to take effective action to stop genocides.
"We need deliberative thinking to go along with our gut feelings," he says. "Our gut feelings will give us the moral intuition that genocide is wrong, but moral reasoning will cause us to lay out reasons to act."
Scholars as well as government officials representing many nations will attend the seminar in Auschwitz.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

How the brain detects the emotions of others

2008-05-12T06:24:00.000-07:00

Source:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13874-how-the-brain-detects-the-emotions-of-others-.html

12:45 12 May 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Alison Motluk

People who are good at interpreting facial expressions have "mirror neuron" systems that are more active, say researchers. The finding adds weight to the idea that these cells are crucial to helping us figure out how others are feeling.
Mirror neurons are brain cells that fire both when you do something and when you watch someone else do the same thing.
Because they allow us to mimic what others are doing, it is thought that these neurons may be responsible for why we can feel empathy, or understand others' intentions and states of mind. People with autism, for instance, show reduced mirror neuron activity during social cognition tasks.
Now Peter Enticott at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues have found evidence supporting this theory. They asked 20 healthy adults to look at pairs of images. In one task, they had to decide if paired images of faces were the same person. In another, they had to decide if both faces were showing the same emotion.
In a separate task, volunteers watched video clips of thumb movement, a hand grasping a pen and a hand while writing, while the activity in the primary motor cortex of the brain, which contains mirror neurons, was recorded.
Emotional link
Now the team had a measure of the "motor potential" in the thumb muscles – for example, how much the thumb was primed to move just by watching another thumb moving. This measure is a proxy for mirror neuron activity, say the researchers.
Enticott's team found that the volunteers who were better at judging people's emotions had higher mirror neuron activity in the thumb task. There was no correlation, however, between the ability to recognise faces and mirror neuron activity. This suggests that mirror neurons are involved in understanding emotions as well as in the mimicry of actions.
"[The study] connects the two different functions – the motor aspect with the emotional processing aspect," says Lindsay Oberman, at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, US. "They show that mirror neurons for motor activity are related to mirror neurons for emotions," she adds.
Journal reference: Neuropsychologia (DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2008.04.022)

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

Child Abuse May 'Mark' Genes In Brains Of Suicide Victims

2008-05-07T22:20:00.001-07:00

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080507084001.htm

ScienceDaily (May 7, 2008) — A team of McGill University scientists has discovered important differences between the brains of suicide victims and so-called normal brains. Although the genetic sequence was identical in the suicide and non-suicide brains, there were differences in their epigenetic marking – a chemical coating influenced by environmental factors.

All of the 13 suicide victims in the study had experienced abuse as children.
“It’s possible the changes in epigenetic markers were caused by the exposure to childhood abuse, although in humans it’s difficult to establish causality between early childhood and epigenetic markers, in the way we have established this in animal subjects,” said Moshe Szyf, a professor in McGill’s Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics. “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”.
In the first study of its kind, Szyf, a professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics; Gustavo Turecki, Department of Psychiatry who practices at the Douglas Hospital; Michael Meaney, a professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurology and Neurosurgery, who is also at the Douglas Hospital; and McGill postdoctoral research fellow Patrick McGowan have built on their world-renowned epigenetics work to uncover differences in the DNA in the brains of a group of male suicide victims from Quebec. The all-McGill study is set to be published in the May 6, 2008 edition of the online journal Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE).
Epigenetics is the study of changes in the function of genes that don’t involve changes in the sequences of DNA. The DNA is inherited from our parents; it remains fixed throughout life and is identical in every part of the body. During gestation, however, the genes in our DNA are marked by a chemical coating called DNA methylation. These marks are somewhat sensitive to one’s environment, especially early in life.
The epigenetic marks punctuate the DNA and program it to express the right genes at the appropriate time and place.
The researchers examined a set of genes that code for rRNA, a basic component of the machinery that creates protein in cells. Protein synthesis is critical for learning, memory and the building of new connections in the brain; it can affect decision-making and other behaviour. The scientists found that rRNA can be regulated epigenetically.
In previous studies in laboratory rats, the group proved that simple maternal behaviour during early childhood has a profound effect on genes and behaviour in ways that are sustained throughout life. However, these effects on gene expression and stress responses can also be reversed in adult life through treatments known to affect the genomic marking known as DNA methylation.
The brain samples in the latest study came from the Quebec Suicide Brain Bank, administered by Dr. Turecki of the Douglas Mental Health University Institute. With the support of the Bureau du Coroner du Québec (Office of the Chief Medical Examiner), the McGill Group for Suicide Studies (MGSS) founded the Quebec Suicide Brain Bank (QSBB) at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, to promote studies on the phenomenon of suicide. Research carried out on brain tissue can help develop intervention and prevention programs to help people suffering mental distress and who are at risk of committing suicide.
The research was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Journal reference: McGowan PO, Sasaki A, Huang TCT, Unterberger A, Suderman M, et al. (2008) Promoter-Wide Hypermethylation of the Ribosomal RNA Gene Promoter in the Suicide Brain. PLoS ONE 3(5): e2085. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002085 [link]
Adapted from materials provided by McGill University.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

Psychiatric Profile Of Teenagers At Risk For Committing Violent Acts, School Shootings

2008-05-07T10:33:00.000-07:00

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080506141651.htm

ScienceDaily (May 7, 2008) — Oregon Health & Science University psychiatrist Jerald Block, M.D., will present new research on the psychiatric factors that can lead to school shootings.*
There have been at least a dozen school shootings in American schools and universities within the past three years, resulting in the deaths of more than 50 students. In 1998 Oregon's Thurston High School in Springfield was the scene of a school shooting in which two students were killed and 25 others wounded.
Block's presentation will be mainly based on his extensive research of the 1999 Columbine high school shootings, which resulted in the deaths of 15 people, including the two students who initiated the attack, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Based on diaries and police records, Block authored a July 2007 article for the American Journal of Forensic Psychiatry titled "Lessons from Columbine: Virtual and Real Rage." Block will also briefly discuss the role of technology in the Red Lake (2005), Virginia Tech (2007), Jokela High School (2007), and North Illinois (2008) school shootings.
The paper on Columbine examines the many factors that may have influenced the shooters and specifically highlights the role that technology played in the tragedy. Prior to the shootings, both teenagers spent a significant amount of time playing first-person-shooter computer games and creating game levels for others to use. In his paper, Block suggests that these virtual worlds became essential for the teens. Block notes that Harris and Klebold may have been unable to distinguish the boundaries between their virtual lives and their real lives, in effect mixing the two.
"Virtual realities, like the ones that Harris and Klebold experienced, are a double-edged sword," explained Block, a clinical faculty member in the OHSU Department of Psychiatry. "On one hand, virtual worlds allow people to feel connected and empowered. They also allow participants to escape stress and have an outlet for aggression. On the other hand, when a heavy user must eliminate or cut back on the virtual, as was the case with these two killers at times, the user can feel lonely, anxious, or angry. In some ways, virtual reality is similar to alcohol. In moderation it can be healthy or even helpful. In excess it can be destructive and isolating. And, when a person goes 'dry,' the situation can turn dangerous."
During the APA meeting, two other experts will join Dr. Block in presenting information about school shootings. Katherine Newman, the Malcolm Forbes Class of 1941 Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs from Princeton University, will speak about the communities where school shootings occur and whether we can predict and prevent these tragedies. FBI Special Agent Terri Royster will discuss the FBI's procedure for assessing school shooting threats.
This is the second presentation within the past three months in which Block has commented on a psychiatric issue with widespread public impacts. In March 2008 Block's editorial on the widespread problem of Internet addiction received international media attention.
*Block's presentation, which is part of a panel discussion that he is chairing, will take place on Tuesday, May 6, during the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) in Washington, D.C.
Adapted from materials provided by Oregon Health & Science University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

The Ancestor Syndrome and the Hidden Links in Our Family Tree

2008-05-06T12:03:00.001-07:00

Source:

http://www.psychogenealogie.name/en/Ancesyn_w.htm

Drawing on decades of experience as a psychodramatist and analyst, Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, in her book The Ancestor Syndrome, explains and provides dramatic clinical examples of her transgenerational approach to psychotherapy. She shows how, as mere links in a family chain of generations, we may have no choice in having the events and traumas first experienced by our ancestors visited upon us again in our own lifetime as it once was in theirs. But, as she says, we do have a choice once we realize it.

Her book includes fascinating case studies to illustrate how her clients have conquered seemingly irrational fears, psychological and even physical difficulties by discovering and understanding the parallels between their own life and the lives of their forebearers. Mysteries as to why things happen can now be solved. Inherited ‘bad luck’ can now be changed. Family curses can now be removed. Ancient guilts and sins of the forebearers can now be resolved.
The theory of ancestral "invisible loyalty" owed to previous generations may indeed predispose us to unwittingly re-enact their suffering and unfinished business in our own life events .Professor Anne Ancelin Schützenberger has spent 50 years of her life researching this phenomena and developing a psychodrama approach to ending this transgenerational karma.
Her solutions and propositions will be discussed and demonstrated in the light of her ongoing research into repetitive patterns which she will present in New Orleans May 25-26.
I met 81 yr old Anne Ancelin Schützenberger in 1999 at the World Conference of Psychotherapy in Vienna where we both were presenting. I went to her presentation on The Anniversary Syndrome there because I was curious since it was right on point with the counseling I was already doing with couples. Within ten minutes, I was overwhelmed with the amazing wealth of information about reoccurring dates, accidents, illnesses, and traumas that Prof. Schützenberger has gathered over her long illustrious career as a psychodramatist.
In her book, The Ancestor Syndrome, she explains how the anniversary date of a certain significant event or terrible tragedy in the past is often stored in unconscious memory and acted out by following generations. Anniversary reactions appear not only as dramatic coincidences in dates and behaviors, but also in health problems, similar accidents, and the exact ages and dates of death that seem to repeat generation after generation without any plausible explanation. It hit home. My mother’s mother had died May 25, 1959, and my mother died May 25, 1983. It was then and only then that I found out from my Aunt Irma that my great-grandmother had also died on a May 25th many years ago. "Never two without three," my mother had said a thousand times throughout her life. And mine. A family belief system, for sure. Writing this, my assistant Bobby Hoerner reminds me that I have scheduled Prof. Schützenberger to do her Ancestor Syndrome Workshop for me in New Orleans on May 25th. Coincidence? I don’t think so.
In April 2000, I went to Paris with six of my students to study with this incredible woman. I learned the depth to which the hidden links in our family tree affect all of us and became even more certain of the value of using her thorough transgenerational approach in my own counseling with clients. "History repeats itself," Clarence Darrow is quoted as saying, "....and that's what's the matter with history." Anne Schützenberger has worked with many many clients over the years to resolve their unconscious directives and legacy from past generations.
Often the roots of current traumas can be explained by an easy but methodical tracing of our family trees, uncovering important similar events that have been interred into our genetic structures, events which pop-up generations later. Trouble comes from unknowingly reliving similar unfinished situations and emotional baggage inherited from our ancestors. The cycle ends when we recognize that the recurring family issues being presented generation after generation are begging for completion.....and once re-solved, can actually fade away and stop. Anne Schützenberger specializes in the resolution of such transgenerational issues and has sent many an illness or negative pattern into remission!
Her workshops explore life, accidents, illnesses and death by working with past unresolved traumas and conflicts that show up in families at certain dates and ages as curses or coincidences. Psychodrama vignettes will be directed with group members toward unearthing, illustrating and resolving these hidden family traumas, closing incomplete situations, saying good-bye and mourning an ancestor's losses. As mere links in a chain of generations, we may have no choice in which problems our ancestors have visited upon us in our own lifetime, but Madame Schützenberger can help you clear their negative karma once and for all.
Her book lists fascinating case studies illustrating how her clients have conquered seemingly irrational fears, psychological and even physical difficulties by discovering and understanding the parallels between their own life and the lives of their forbearers. Most family problems have been around a lot longer than anyone ever realized. The workshop offers a unique opportunity to end the cycle.
I know that in-depth parental histories solve most mysteries and had written about that in my book, Why We Pick The Mates We Do. Now I was beginning to understand that most of these relationship problems had been around a lot longer than I ever realized. It wasn’t just their parental couple, it was an imprinted ancestral couple pattern. Generation after generation, inherited emotional and behavioral imprints had been demonstrated and learned by example, but others were kept secret and never revealed. Amazingly, they were still showing up in successive generations. I realized these issues were begging for closure. Often locked in unconscious memory, it became A-Parent that these imprinted set of instructions were the answers that explained most inherited negative feelings, irrational behaviors and repetitive traumatic events. I believe it is of the utmost importance to resolve our ancestors’ unresolved legacy before we can truly evolve ourselves.
The Ancestor Syndrome explains life and death issues through the "family tree" and the manner in which memories of past-unresolved traumas and conflicts are passed on to future generations. In her workshops, Psychodrama vignettes will be directed by Prof. Schützenberger with group members and aimed toward unearthing, illustrating, and resolving hidden family traumas, closing incomplete situations, saying good-bye and mourning an ancestor's losses. Efforts are made to understand these phenomena in the larger context of one's family psychological and economical history, "psychohistory", hidden family loyalties, calamitous events, such as war, unbearable trauma, unjust death, family secrets, and the Anniversary Syndrome. This workshop will be experiential with theory.Every individual's life is a novel. You and I, we live as part of an invisible web, a web we also help to weave. Yet if we open up our perception and develop what Theodore Reich referred to as our third ear... and eastern philosophies refer to as our third eye - then we can grasp and better understand the repetitions and coincidences in our family history, and our individual lives can become clearer. We can become more aware of who we are, of who we could be... how we can escape the invisible binds and blocks in our family's history, and the triangular alliances established in our family structure, from the unnecessary and all too frequent repetitions of difficult situations that make no sense from the one dimensional view. This is her first visit to New Orleans. I am honored to present this very special human being, the pioneer in transgenerational therapy.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

Intelligence And Rhythmic Accuracy Go Hand In Hand

2008-04-21T04:36:00.001-07:00

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080416100459.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 21, 2008) — People who score high on intelligence tests are also good at keeping time, new Swedish research shows. The team that carried out the study also suspect that accuracy in timing is important to the brain processes responsible for problem solving and reasoning.

Researchers at the medical university Karolinska Institutet and Umeå University have now demonstrated a correlation between general intelligence and the ability to tap out a simple regular rhythm. They stress that the task subjects performed had nothing to do with any musical rhythmic sense but simply measured the capacity for rhythmic accuracy. Those who scored highest on intelligence tests also had least variation in the regular rhythm they tapped out in the experiment.
"It's interesting as the task didn't involve any kind of problem solving," says Fredrik Ullén at Karolinska Institutet, who led the study with Guy Madison at Umeå University. "Irregularity of timing probably arises at a more fundamental biological level owing to a kind of noise in brain activity."
According to Fredrik Ullén, the results suggest that the rhythmic accuracy in brain activity observable when the person just maintains a steady beat is also important to the problem-solving capacity that is measured with intelligence tests.
"We know that accuracy at millisecond level in neuronal activity is critical to information processing and learning processes," he says.
They also demonstrated a correlation between high intelligence, a good ability to keep time, and a high volume of white matter in the parts of the brain's frontal lobes involved in problem solving, planning and managing time.
"All in all, this suggests that a factor of what we call intelligence has a biological basis in the number of nerve fibres in the prefrontal lobe and the stability of neuronal activity that this provides," says Fredrik Ullén.
Publication: 'Intelligence and variability in a simple timing task share neural substrates in the prefrontal white matter', Fredrik Ullén, Lea Forsman, Örjan Blom, Anke Karabanov and Guy Madison, The Journal of Neuroscience, 16 April 2008.
Adapted from materials provided by Karolinska Institutet.

Fausto Intilla - www.oloscience.com

Decision-making May Be Surprisingly Unconscious Activity

2008-04-15T12:35:00.001-07:00

Source:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/04/080414145705.htm

ScienceDaily (Apr. 15, 2008) — Contrary to what most of us would like to believe, decision-making may be a process handled to a large extent by unconscious mental activity. A team of scientists has unraveled how the brain actually unconsciously prepares our decisions. Even several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted from unconscious activity in the brain.

This is shown in a study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, in collaboration with the Charité University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin. The researchers from the group of Professor John-Dylan Haynes used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made. "Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our consciousness. This prevents our mind from being overloaded by simple routine tasks. But when it comes to decisions we tend to assume they are made by our conscious mind. This is questioned by our current findings."
In the study, published in Nature Neuroscience, participants could freely decide if they wanted to press a button with their left or right hand. They were free to make this decision whenever they wanted, but had to remember at which time they felt they had made up their mind. The aim of the experiment was to find out what happens in the brain in the period just before the person felt the decision was made. The researchers found that it was possible to predict from brain signals which option participants would take up to seven seconds before they consciously made their decision. Normally researchers look at what happens when the decision is made, but not at what happens several seconds before. The fact that decisions can be predicted so long before they are made is a astonishing finding.
This unprecedented prediction of a free decision was made possible by sophisticated computer programs that were trained to recognize typical brain activity patterns preceding each of the two choices. Micropatterns of activity in the frontopolar cortex were predictive of the choices even before participants knew which option they were going to choose. The decision could not be predicted perfectly, but prediction was clearly above chance. This suggests that the decision is unconsciously prepared ahead of time but the final decision might still be reversible.
"Most researchers investigate what happens when people have to decide immediately, typically as a rapid response to an event in our environment. Here we were focusing on the more interesting decisions that are made in a more natural, self-paced manner", Haynes explains.
More than 20 years ago the American brain scientist Benjamin Libet found a brain signal, the so-called "readiness-potential" that occurred a fraction of a second before a conscious decision. Libet’s experiments were highly controversial and sparked a huge debate. Many scientists argued that if our decisions are prepared unconsciously by the brain, then our feeling of "free will" must be an illusion. In this view, it is the brain that makes the decision, not a person’s conscious mind. Libet’s experiments were particularly controversial because he found only a brief time delay between brain activity and the conscious decision.
In contrast, Haynes and colleagues now show that brain activity predicts -- even up to 7 seconds ahead of time -- how a person is going to decide. But they also warn that the study does not finally rule out free will: "Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. We need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed."
Journal reference: Chun Siong Soon, Marcel Brass, Hans-Jochen Heinze & John-Dylan Haynes. Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain. Nature Neuroscience April 13th, 2008.
Adapted from materials provided by Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.

Fausto Intilla

Behavioral & Social Sciences,News & Press - A Blog by F.Intilla (WWW.OLOSCIENCE.COM)

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