New research just out reveals some pretty fascinating data about which emotions are most effective in persuading in difficult cases...and the direction consumers are likely to go when experiencing still other emotions.
How do you think emotions affect your choices during challenging decisions, such as compromising on vehicle safety to get better gas mileage on a car? In their June article in the Journal of Consumer Research, Nitika Garg, Jeffrey Inman and Vikas Mittal find that angry consumers react very differently from sad consumers when making emotionally difficult trade-offs.
According to the study, angry consumers were 37% more likely to choose a default option than sad individuals. In contrast, sad individuals were not different from neutral mood individuals when it came to consumer decision making.
This study shows that all negative emotions are not the same. For instance, if you are choosing different retirement options, you are more likely to stick with the default retirement option (often company stock) if you are angry compared to sad. Sad people tend to examine all the options more carefully and choose the best available option. The moral: Don't make important decisions when you are angry.
KEY POINT: Sad people look at all options and do so carefully...choosing the best option. Angry people tend to stick with the status quo.
"Smoking pot may not kill you, but it will kill your mother," says an ad from the Partnership for a Drug-Free America. In the first empirical work to examine both stated intentions and actual behavior, researchers argue that this sort of negative message -- evoking both fear and guilt -- is a far more effective deterrent to potentially harmful behavior than positive hopeful or feel-good messages.
"Making people feel good is less important than making people feel accountable when it comes to making wise decisions about self-protection," explain Kirsten A. Passyn (Salisbury University) and Mita Sujan (Tulane University) in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. "Our work separates intentions from implementation and clarifies the role of emotions in this process."
KEY POINT: Good intentions and positive emotions can elicit further good intentions but they don't necessarily cause people to actually DO something.
Whether it involves persuading people to use sunscreen or eat high fiber foods, good intentions can be elicited by a variety of appeals. However, getting people to actually follow through on these intentions and change their behavior requires appeals combining fear and an emotion high in self-accountability, such as regret, guilt or challenge.
KEY POINT: Fear, regret, guilt and challenge cause people to FOLLOW THROUGH.
"[This research] suggests a new emotion-based approach to encouraging a wide range of health protection behaviors," say Passyn and Sujan. "We illustrate the critical role of emotions in persuasion, especially for translating tendencies into action."
Kirsten A. Passyn and Mita Sujan. "Self-Accountability Emotions and Fear Appeals: Motivating Behavior" Journal of Consumer Research. March 2006.
Attractive kids are physically abused and murdered less often by their Mothers than unattractive kids. That fact really ripped into a lot of parent's hearts when I reported on this recently. Get ready to brace yourself again.
Research released last month shows that in the USA attractive kids live significantly longer than unattractive kids. It's particularly important to men.
Attractive men live on average to age 76. The same is true for women. However, unattractive men only live until age 69 while their female counterparts live til 73. Attractiveness which was once thought to be a more crucial factor to women, may indeed far more crucial to men.
Why do attractive people, particularly men, live so much longer? It's impossible to say with certainty.
But what about daily life of attractive and unattractive kids? Who gets more attention? Is there a difference?
It turns out there is...and it's big.
A researcher at the University of Alberta has shown that parents are more likely to give better care and pay closer attention to good-looking children compared to unattractive ones. Dr. Andrew Harrell presented his findings recently at the Warren E. Kalbach Population Conference in Edmonton, Alberta.
Harrell's findings are based on an observational study of children and shopping cart safety. With the approval of management at 14 different supermarkets, Harrell's team of researchers observed parents and their two to five-year-old children for 10 minutes each, noting if the child was buckled into the grocery-cart seat, and how often the child wandered more than 10 feet away. The researchers independently graded each child on a scale of one to 10 on attractiveness.
Findings showed that 1.2 per cent of the least attractive children were buckled in, compared with 13.3 per cent of the most attractive youngsters. The observers also noticed the less attractive children were allowed to wander further away and more often from their parents. In total, there were 426 observations at the 14 supermarkets.
Harrell, who has been researching shopping cart safety since 1990 and has published a total of 13 articles on the topic, figures his latest results are based on a parent's instinctive Darwinian response: we're unconsciously more likely to lavish attention on attractive children simply because they're our best genetic material.
"Attractiveness as a predictor of behaviour, especially parenting behaviour, has been around a long time," said Harrell, a father of five and a grandfather of three. "Most parents will react to these results with shock and dismay. They'll say, 'I love all my kids, and I don't discriminate on the basis of attractiveness.' The whole point of our research is that people do." 2005
One of the reasons I wrote Irresistible Attraction: Secrets of Personal Magnetism was to help each one of us to be perceived as more attractive.
Why?
Attractive people end up with better jobs, greater net worth, more attractive spouses, live longer, are less likely to be abused or killed by a parent...in short...attraction is more than important, it is a crucial element of social psychology that won't be changing anytime soon.
This week, new data on attraction was released and I want to be the first to show it to you!
Why wasn't I born rich instead of handsome? Or so the lament goes. But an office of the nation's central bank now says that if you're gorgeous, chances are better that you will get paid more than plain folks.
Analysis by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis suggests that good-looking people tend to make more money and get promoted more often than those with average looks. The analysis is published in the April edition of The Regional Economist, the Fed's quarterly magazine.
Research analyst Kristie Engemann and economist Michael Owyang looked at the possible link between appearance and wages by evaluating previous surveys and research. Their conclusion: It helps to be tall, slender and attractive.
Less clear was whether the less attractive are victims of bias, or if good-looking people tend to develop self-confidence and social skills that simply enhance their marketability.
"It doesn't seem like anti-discrimination laws, even if you enforce them strictly, would be a magic bullet," Owyang said.
The researchers cited one study that found a "plainness penalty" of 9 percent in wages - meaning a person with below-average looks tended to earn 9 percent less than those with average looks - and a "beauty premium" of 5 percent.
A study concerning weight showed that women who were obese earned 17 percent lower wages than women of average weight.
Height matters, too, the researchers believe. One study looked at the height of 16-year-olds and the wages they earned later as adults. The taller teens went on to earn an average of 2.6 percent more per additional inch of height.
"Maybe they developed extra confidence early on that their shorter counterparts didn't have," Engemann said.
The researchers also cited a survey by journalist Malcolm Gladwell showing that the average chief executive is 3 inches taller than the average man. While a typical American male stands 5-foot-9, Gladwell's study found that about one-third of CEOs are 6-foot-2.
Jean Seawright, a human resources consultant from Winter Park, Fla., said the analysis backs up what she sees in the workplace.
"To some degree, it's that the (boss) is drawn to certain characteristics, and they tend to put more weight on that," Seawright said. "What can happen, unfortunately, is that they miss more important job-related traits.
"It hurts employment in the long-run because there are talented people out there who are not tall, blond, slender and attractive," Seawright said.
Engemann and Owyang said that in some cases, the attractive are simply more self-confident because of their good looks. For jobs where interpersonal interaction is important, that increased confidence can result in better communications skills that may improve job performance.
"Employers might believe that customers or co-workers want to interact with more-attractive people," the researchers wrote.
The research indicates that some people who are obese may be held back by health factors or low self-esteem. Yet discrimination also seemed to play a role. Researchers said the wage differential for obese women seemed to be limited to white women, "which seems to contradict an unmeasured productivity explanation."
Owyang and Engemann also cited a study indicating the beauty premium existed, even for occupations that do not require frequent interpersonal contact.
"As these results suggest, disentangling the effects of productivity differences and discrimination can be problematic," Owyang said. "Though discrimination is a possible explanation, anti-discrimination laws might not guarantee that these wage differentials would evaporate.
"Unmeasurable productivity might still result in pay disparities, and CEOs might still be tall." 2005
Does he have good "values" and "morals", or is he just as addicted to you as he is to gambling, drugs, religion or The Simpsons? For better or worse, it seems, addiction is the answer.
It appears that "Romantic Love" that has all of the passionate components of intense feelings from one person toward another, jealousy and devotion compare almost identically to the process and experience of addiction to drugs, like cocaine.
In fact, monogamy is addiction. Both drug addiction and monogamy are experienced in the brain in the same neural pathways. The ramifications are startling and teach us a lot about ourselves.
As strange as it may seem, it appears if you want a monogamous partner, you might be looking for that "addictive personality" which we are now finding is nothing more than a specific reward function in the addictive person's brain.
I've included the latest and most shocking two studies in this week's Coffee for you:
Researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University and Atlanta's Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) have found transferring a single gene, the vasopressin receptor, into the brain's reward center makes a promiscuous male meadow vole monogamous. This finding, which appears in the June 17 issue of Nature, may help better explain the neurobiology of romantic love as well as disorders of the ability to form social bonds, such as autism. In addition, the finding supports previous research linking social bond formation with drug addiction, also associated with the reward center of the brain.
In their study, Yerkes and CBN post-doctoral fellow Miranda M. Lim, PhD, and Yerkes researcher Larry J. Young, PhD, of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University's School of Medicine and the CBN, attempted to determine whether differences in vasopressin receptor levels between prairie and meadow voles could explain their opposite mating behaviors. Previous studies of monogamous male prairie voles, which form lifelong social or pair bonds with a single mate, determined the animals' brains contain high levels of vasopressin receptors in one of the brain's principal reward regions, the ventral pallidum. The comparative species of vole, the promiscuous meadow vole, which frequently mates with multiple partners, lacks vasopressin receptors in the ventral pallidum.
The scientists used a harmless virus to transfer the vasopressin receptor gene from prairie voles into the ventral pallidum of meadow voles, which increased vasopressin receptors in the meadow vole to prairie-like levels. The researchers discovered, just like prairie voles, the formerly promiscuous meadow voles then displayed a strong preference for their current partners rather than new females.
Young acknowledges many genes are likely involved in regulating lifelong pair bonds between humans. "Our study, however, provides evidence, in a comparatively simple animal model, that changes in the activity of a single gene profoundly can change a fundamental social behavior of animals within a species."
According to previous research, vasopressin receptors also may play a role in disorders of the ability to form social bonds, such as in autism. "It is intriguing," says Young, "to consider that individual differences in vasopressin receptors in humans might play a role in how differently people form relationships."
And, Lim adds, past research in humans has shown the same neural pathways involved in the formation of romantic relationships are involved in drug addiction. "The brain process of bonding with one's partner may be similar to becoming addicted to drugs: both activate reward circuits in the brain."
The researchers' next step is to determine why there is extensive variability in behaviors among individuals within a species in order to better understand the evolution of social behavior.
The reward mechanism involved in addiction appears to regulate lifelong social or pair bonds between monogamous mating animals, according to a Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) study of prairie voles published in the January 19 edition of the Journal of Comparative Neurology. The finding could have implications for understanding the basis of romantic love and disorders of the ability to form social attachments, such as autism and schizophrenia.
In their research, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, Larry Young, PhD., associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Emory University School of Medicine and an affiliate scientist at Yerkes National Primate Research Center; graduate student Miranda Lim; and Anne Murphy, PhD., associate professor of biology at Georgia State University, examined the distribution of two brain receptors in the ventral forebrain of monogamous prairie voles that have been previously tied to pair bond formation: oxytocin (OTR) and vasopressin V1a receptor (V1aR). Using receptor audiographic techniques, the scientists found that these receptors are confined to two of the brain's reward centers, the nucleus accumbens and the ventral pallidum. V1aR receptors, which are thought to be activated in the male vole brain during pair bond formation, were confined largely to the ventral pallidum. OTR receptors, which play a crucial role in pair bond formation in females, were found mainly in the nucleus accumbens.
The V1aR and OTR receptors did not overlap between the two brain regions, and were equally distributed in the brains of male and female voles. According to Dr. Young, the findings, coupled with the close proximity of the nucleus accumbens and ventral pallidum-- two regions with heavily interconnected structures--suggest that a common neural circuit in male and female voles regulates pair bond formation.
Past studies have found the dopamine system of the nucleus accumbens produces the rewarding and sometimes addictive effects of sex, food and drugs of abuse. Dr. Young believes the same reward pathways are likely stimulated during and following pair bond formation.
"Although the process of pair bond formation results from the activity of two different neurochemicals in separate regions of the ventral forebrain in male and female vole brains," said Young, "the OTR and V1aR systems appear to activate two separate nodes of the same reward pathway to form and reinforce pair bonds."
In another finding, the CBN researchers determined that OTR and V1aR are closely located near the nerve fibers that release oxytocin and vasopressin. Lim speculated that their proximity likely facilitates pair bond formation during mating.
CBN studies currently underway continue to examine other components of the neural circuit involved in pair bond formation.
The monogamous prairie vole, which forms lifelong pair bonds, provides an ideal animal model for studying the neural basis of social attachment. In previous studies, CBN scientists have determined:
The genes for vasopressin and oxytocin are critical for the proper processing of social information;
A lack of genes for vasopressin and oxytocin receptors results in a deficit in social recognition and altered anxiety in mice;
Vasopressin and oxytocin play key roles in the formation of social attachments between animals. Increasing the amount of vasopressin receptors in the brain using gene transfer techniques can increase pair-bonding behavior in monogamous male prairie voles.
These findings will help us understand key information when it comes to bonding and mating in the future. 2004
You come to the point in the movie where you "get it." You know who the murderer is. You finally figure out the question on the test. You read the book and everything becomes completely clear for the first time. And you know what? It turns out that you REMEMBER these "discoveries" and "AHA's" far more than information acquired in other ways.
It turns out the AHA is not a mystical experience but one that is triggered by specific cues.
So what would happen if you could actually construct stickiness to your suggestions you make to individuals that you want to comply with your wishes?
You can!
Tufts researchers have isolated the electrical pulse that marks each "moment of clarity" in the brain, sparking new insights into how the brain handles thinking and creativity.
Throughout history, "Eureka!" moments -- when fuzzy thoughts suddenly snap into focus -- have been responsible for some of our society's best thinking, from Darwin's theory of evolution to Edison's first light bulb. But scientists were still waiting for such an insight to explain how these moments of clarity actually work... until now.
Tufts researchers have just isolated the moment when the brain prompts us to say "aha!" -- paving the way for new insights into how the mind works.
"A moment of clarity may feel like a fleeting and mysterious experience, but now Tufts University scientists say they can measure it," reported The Boston Globe. "They are finding that the 'eureka moment' is marked by a distinct electrical pulse in the brain."
Sal Soraci -- an associate professor of psychology at Tufts -- and several of his colleagues have been studying the electrical activity in the brain during so-called "eureka moments" in an attempt to understand what occurs when a person suddenly grasps a particular concept.
As part of his research, Soraci used a set of carefully crafted sentences designed to trigger an "aha!" moment, reported the Globe.
"Imagine reading a sentence that doesn't seem to make sense: 'The girl spilled her popcorn because the lock broke.' The mind starts casting about for answers," reported the newspaper. "Then comes the clue -- lion cage. Suddenly -- aha! -- the sentence snaps into focus."
According to Soraci, his team at Tufts has isolated an electrical pulse in the front of the brain that corresponds with those moments of clarity.
"About 400 milliseconds after the key word is read, revealing the meaning of the sentence, electrodes on the scalp pick up a pulse, called a N400," reported the Globe.
While scientists have known about the electrical pulses in the brain for some time, the Tufts research is the first to isolate one for this particular brain function.
The discovery, says Soraci, opens new doors for researchers to understand the brain.
"[The Tufts research] indicates that the 'eureka moment' can not only be detected electrically, but may itself hold important secrets, giving new insights into creativity, thinking and memory, and even suggesting better ways to teach," reported the Globe. "One of the secrets may be the intriguing notion that confusion is key to memory."
The theory is based on the idea that the more the brain attempts to figure out a concept, the better it remembers it.
In one example, Soraci told the Globe he showed people a blurred object and slowly brought it into focus.
"As the object comes into focus, [Soraci explained], the brain generates a stream of guesses (Is it a doughnut? A peace symbol?) until the truth emerges (a clock)," reported the newspaper. "These wrong guesses may lay the foundation for a strong memory."
The theory could change the way teachers introduce new concepts.
"Solaci said educators should strive to design lessons that will give students 'aha moments,'" reported the Globe. "A lesson on evolution, for example, might start with some of the same clues Darwin saw -- striking similarities between man and ape, finches exquisitely attuned to their environments -- before explaining the theory."
The discovery is the latest in a stream of research by Soraci on the topic, dating back to 1979 when he and several colleagues first discovered what is now known as the "aha effect." 2003
Is it true that all of us are split personalities?
Research just in Friday seems to validate all of the work that has been done in the last few years about the two very different points of view, decision making ability, attitudes, behaviors, and experience found within each person.
The practical use of what is revealed in this neuroscientific research is critical in business, sales, influence, therapy and relationships. In fact, those individuals who don't understand what we have been discussing in the past nine months will literally fall behind in all of these areas. Why? Understanding that there is a deliberative thinking and emotional thinking process that go on simultaneously is the key to unlocking our understanding of how to help people change.
The next time you are frustrated by someone who says, "I'm of two minds about this," at least you will know why. The latest research conducted by Kip Smith, an assistant professor of psychology at Kansas State University, may be able to explain why people often can't make up their minds. Smith's current study focuses on which parts of the brain are used in the decision-making process.
"We're of at least two minds," Smith said. "This research shows the brain is not a single entity. There is not a single executive decision-making mechanism there."
Smith's research has resulted in neuroimages of the parts of the brain used in different types of choices. Smith said there are two systems for making decisions in the brain: deliberative and emotional. Deliberative systems, also referred to as calculation areas, utilize parts of the brain related to mathematics and rational decisions. Emotional systems utilize older, more primal parts of the brain.
According to Smith, individual behavior is affected by attitudes about payoffs, such as gains and losses, in addition to beliefs about outcomes, such as risk and ambiguity. During the experiments, the brain activity of participants was measured by positron emission tomography (PET). The research demonstrates the relationship between brain activity and observed choices. Smith's results allowed him to create images of the parts of the brain used for risk, ambiguity, gains and losses with decision making in the experiment.
Smith said some of the results were surprising. "We thought that risky losses would be processed by the part of the brain that responds to fear, but they were dealt with in a fairly rational manner," he said. Also, the deliberative areas of the brain did not show high usage with decisions relating to risky gains. "It could be that the emotional areas overwhelm the calculation areas. The results are correlational, because it's not a completely controlled experiment." 2003
Source: University Of Michigan Health System
Date Posted: 10/28/2002
Web Address: www.sciencedaily.com
ANN ARBOR, MI – Patients with lower back pain that can't be traced to a
specific physical cause may have abnormal pain-processing pathways in
their brains, according to a new study led by University of Michigan
researchers.
The effect, which as yet has no explanation, is similar to an altered
pain perception effect in fibromyalgia patients recently reported by the
same research team.
In fact, the study finds, people with lower back pain say they feel severe
pain, and have measurable pain signals in their brains, from a gentle
finger squeeze that barely feels unpleasant to people without lower back
pain. People with fibromyalgia felt about the same pain from a squeeze of
the same intensity.
But the squeeze's force must be increased sharply to cause healthy people
to feel the same level of pain -- and their pain signals register p in
different brain areas.
The results, which will be presented Oct. 27 at the annual meeting of the
American College of Rheumatology in New Orleans, may help lead researchers
to important findings on lower back pain, and on enhanced pain perception
in general.
Senior authors Richard Gracely, Ph.D., and Daniel Clauw, M.D., did the
study at Georgetown University Medical Center and the National Institutes
of Health, but are now continuing the work at the University of Michigan
Health System. In May, they and their colleagues published a paper in the
journal Arthritis and Rheumatism on pain perception in fibromyalgia
patients.
To correlate subjective pain sensation with objective views of brain
signals, the researchers used a super-fast form of MRI brain imaging,
called functional MRI or fMRI. They looked at the brains of 15 people with
lower back pain whose body scans showed no mechanical cause, such as a
ruptured disk, for their pain. They also looked at 15 fibromyalgia
patients and 15 normal control subjects.
As a result, they say, the study offers the first objective method for
corroborating what lower back pain patients report they feel, and what's
going on in their brains at the precise moment they feel it. And, it
continues to give researchers a road map of the areas of the brain that
are most -- and least -- active when patients feel pain. The researchers
hope that further study on larger groups of patients will yield more
information on altered pain processing.
"The fMRI technology gave us a unique opportunity to look at the
neurobiology underlying tenderness, which is a hallmark of both lower back
pain and fibromyalgia," says Clauw. "These results, combined with other
work done by our group and others, have convinced us that some pathologic
process is making these patients more sensitive. For some reason, still
unknown, there's a neurobiological amplification of their pain signals."
Lower back pain affects nearly all Americans from time to time, especially
those who are overweight, sedentary or work in physically demanding jobs.
The pain can interfere with life and work; problems stemming from lower
back pain are the second most frequent cause of lost work days in adults
under the age of 45, ranking below only the common cold.
Much of the pain may be due to pulled muscles, strained ligaments, damaged
joints or small tears in the disks that act as cushions between the bones
of the spine -- all causes that don't show up well on X-rays but often can
be seen on CT or conventional MRI scans. These physical causes often
disappear after a few weeks, but many patients have chronic or recurring
lower-back pain.
In the study, the lower-back pain patients were examined by CT scan to
rule out mechanical causes of their pain. Then they, the fibromyalgia
patients and the healthy control subjects had their brains scanned by fMRI
for more than 10 minutes while a small, piston-controlled device applied
precisely calibrated, rapidly pulsing pressure to the base of their left
thumbnail. The pressures were varied over time, using painful and
non-painful levels that had been set for each patient prior to the scan.
The study's design gave two opportunities to compare patients and
controls. The subjective comparison measured the pressure levels at which
the pain rating given by back pain patients, fibromyalgia patients and
control subjects was the same. The objective comparison looked at the
rating that the three types of participants gave when the same level of
pressure was applied.
The researchers found that it only took a mild pressure to produce
self-reported feelings of pain in the lower-back pain and fibromyalgia
patients, while the control subjects tolerated the same pressure with
little pain.
"In both the back pain patients and the fibromyalgia patients, that same
mild pressure also produced measurable brain responses in areas that
process the sensation of pain," says Clauw. "But the same kind of brain
responses weren't seen in control subjects until the pressure on their
thumb increased substantially."
Though brain activity increased in many of the same areas in both patients
and control subjects, there were striking differences, too. All the
subjects had increased activity in eight areas of their brains, but
lower-back pain patients showed no increased activity in two areas that
were active in both fibromyalgia patients and normal control subjects.
Meanwhile, fibromyalgia patients showed increased activation in two other
areas not active in back pain patients and healthy subjects.
This response suggests that lower-back pain patients have enhanced
response to pain in some brain regions, and a diminished response in
others, Clauw says.
The study was supported in part by the National Fibromyalgia Research
Association, the U.S. Army and the NIH. In addition to Clauw and Gracely,
the research team included Thorsten Giesecke and Masilo Grant of UMHS,
Karen Munoz of NIH, Reshma Kumar of Georgetown, and Alf Nachemson of the
University of Gotenberg, Sweden.
Which has the greatest effect on your heart's health: arguing with a spouse or running a marathon? Arguing could have closer links to later heart disease, but for an unusual reason. Just thinking about the fight appears to lead to high blood pressure and later health problems, according to a UC Irvine-led study.
Both tasks raise blood pressure and cause some stress on the body, but arguments have an emotional side that creates longer recovery times in the body than non-emotional -- yet stressful -- events like running. The study appears in the Sept./Oct. issue of Psychosomatic Medicine. Laura Glynn, UCI assistant professor of psychiatry, and her colleagues at UC San Diego and Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York found that when asked to remember tasks associated with emotionally driven rises in blood pressure, students' blood pressure rose and stayed high.
Thinking back to physical tasks did not have the same effect.
"Exposure to emotional stress may be of greater potential harm to cardiovascular health than stresses that lack emotion, even though both types of stress may have provoked the same initial responses," Glynn said. "Preventing the damaging effects of stress may involve not only reducing exposure to stressors, but also reducing opportunities to ruminate over past stress."
Glynn and her team tested 72 students at UC San Diego. Those who were asked to either count backwards while being interrupted or avoid an electric shock had higher systolic blood pressures (the upper number) by about 16 mm of mercury when asked to remember the tasks. By comparison, students who were told to walk in place or put their hands in freezing water had no increase in blood pressure when asked to remember the event. The blood pressures of students taking part in the first two emotional tasks took much longer to recover to normal levels.
In addition, another group of students who were left alone after an emotional task tended to ruminate over the task and have higher blood pressure than students who were distracted from thinking about the task. While the difficulty of the task played no role in determining later blood pressures, those who experienced fear and nervousness during the test were able to clearly recall those emotions and re-create their cardiovascular response.
Chronic stress is considered an important factor in elevation of blood pressure, which is considered a major cause of heart disease. While many researchers have looked at the role played by relentless chronic stress, such as a demanding job or unstable home life, relatively few studies have focused on the lingering effects of even a single, emotion-laden stressful event.
High blood pressure affects at least 20 percent of all Americans. Chronically high blood pressure, a condition known as hypertension, can lead to heart attacks, atherosclerosis, strokes and kidney failure.
"Our study indicates that certain people may be at increased risk for developing heart disease, based at least partly on how they respond to stress," Glynn said. "Developing ways to intervene with rumination behavior and encouraging social support for these individuals may help prevent emotional stress from contributing to heart disease later."
Glynn and her colleagues have been studying how stress may lead to a number of disorders, including premature birth, neurological disorders and cardiovascular disease.
Psychologists (and others!) have long wondered what motivates people to be nice. Researchers at Emory University have found that cooperating with another person actually activates the pleasure centers of the brain, the same parts that are stimulated by rewards like food or money!
The scientists used magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of 36 women while they played the "Prisoner's Dilemma Game", a decades-old model for conflict and cooperation. Two players independently chose to either band together or defect. If they cooperated, they each earned $2; if both defected, each got $1. But if one cooperated and one defected, the defector was paid $3 and the cooperator got nothing.
The researchers found that most of the time the women chose to cooperate. Whenever they did work together, the scientists could see stimulation in two parts of the brain associated with pleasure. "This suggests that people find it rewarding to cooperate with each other," says neuroscientist Gregory Berns. "Mutual small acts of kindness really do make you feel better."
As reported in the October 2002 issue of Readers Digest.
Need another reason to lose those extra pounds? How about reducing your risk of getting cancer? Research now shows that fat doesn't just sit there -- it actively alters the body's normal hormonal and chemical balances, sending signals that, under the right conditions, cause cancer to grow. "The more we understand about obesity, the more we realize that simply being overweight and inactive -- in other words, living the modern American lifestyle -- produces basic hormonal and metabolic changes," says George Bray, MD, of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, in a news release.
"These changes make it easier for cancer to gain a foothold," Bray says. Bray presented his research at the World Cancer Research International, a scientific conference on diet and cancer. New technologies are allowing scientists to study the influence of obesity on the body more precisely than ever before, he says. "Most of us look at our guts and our hips and our love handles and think of fat as an inert substance that merely collects and hangs off of us," says Bray.
However, research shows that body fat produces an excess of substances such as sex hormones and insulin. Under normal circumstances these are perfectly normal substances that contribute to natural body chemistry. But in an obese person, higher levels of these chemicals can urge cells to grow and divide at an accelerated rate. Some scientists predict that excess body fat will ultimately prove to be strongly implicated in the development of the so-called "hormonal" cancers -- those of the breast, prostate, ovary, uterus, and testicle, says Bray.
But obesity doesn't seem to affect only these types of cancers. In fact, one study of almost 90,000 women -- between 40 and 59 -- shows that obesity doubles the risk of colorectal cancer in women. Researcher Thomas E. Rohan, MD, PhD, chairman of epidemiology and social medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, published the results in the August issue of the medical journal Gut. Before menopause, fat tissue is only a minor source of total estrogen circulating in the body. Therefore, being very overweight in youth and young adulthood may increase a woman's risk for bowel cancer, they say. However, being very overweight after menopause did not increase the women's risk of bowel cancer, reports Rohan. If anything, their risk slightly decreased. He suggests that after menopause, fat tissue is an important source of estrogen, which may be protective and counteract the harmful effects of insulin in the bloodstream.
Bottom line: "Avoiding weight gain is one of the most important things we can do to prevent cancer," says Bray.
In a recent Coffee With Kevin Hogan e-zine, we talked about why and when women have extramarital affairs. (Women tend to have affairs when they are ovulating.) In the last issue we discussed why members of both sexes tell lies. (It would seem women have an edge in the virtue department here because although women and men lie 2-3 times for every 10 minutes of conversation....men tend to tell lies to make themselves look better while women tell lies to make others feel better. Interesting.) So, here we are with the question, why do men cheat? Who specifically and when?
Very little is as interesting to us humans as to why we lie and cheat and how we know if someone is cheating us or lying to us. Recent research shows that there are plenty of cheaters and chumps (Scientific American this month) in the world and that most of us will spend a significant portion of our lives avoiding being cheated and then punishing those that cheat us. Interestingly, people tend to punish cheaters with far more retribution than the cheater "took" from us...even if it costs the one cheated a great deal of time and money. We all hate to be taken advantage of...in any fashion... and the more we are cheated the more skeptical and cynical we typically become.
As much as women are biologically programmed to build a nest, fill it and tend it until the woman's offspring can fly the coop, men are wired in a completely different fashion for the survival of the species Men are genetically wired to spread as much "seed" as is possible. Women are limited to the number of children they can mother. Men however are virtually unlimited as to the number of children they can father. From a natural (evolutionary) standpoint, the formula is ideal for the survival of the species. Highly motivated males impregnate as many possible females with the genetic message to produce and protect as many offspring as is possible written write into your DNA. Mother nature truly is an interesting character...and she generates some interesting problems with men's short term mating strategies.
Symons (1979) showed us clearly that men have need for "variety" and many men have powerful sexual drives that virtually compel them to impregnate as many women as possible. Many men's genetic make up is similar to the likes of King Solomon (1000+ wives) from the Bible. David Buss (1993), one of the world's leading psychologists interviewed hundreds of men and women and discovered that in the next year (from the date of the survey), men on average desired 6+ partners. Women? One. Men's innate desire for sexual activity is significantly greater than that of women's. How much so?
Buss discovered that men are very comfortable and likely to say they will have sex with an attractive woman that they have known for less than one week. Women on the other hand, offer virtually no hope for the male in having sex with men in less than one week. What percentage of marrieds are likely to have sex with someone outside of marriage? The numbers are fuzzy. No two studies seem to replicate the others but one fact is clear. Men have sex outside of marriage than do married women. Perhaps as many as 25% of men and 15% of women. As incomes climb for the men, the likelihood of extramarital affairs climbs. As physical attractiveness of the man climbs so does his likelihood of having affairs. Specifically, those men with symmetrical features are far more likely to have extramarital affairs than men with asymmetrical features.
Does self esteem matter? We already know that women low in self esteem are far more likely to have affairs than women with high self esteem. There is no correlation, however, between self esteem and extramarital mating among men. Low self esteem is the greatest predictor of women's likelihood for extramarital affairs. The greatest predictors for men are opportunity, income and symmetrical features.
Even with all this information we haven't answered "why?" The answer is really quite simple. Any male (of virtually any species on earth) can enjoy the pleasures of sexual relations with a female and then go on immediately about his business. However, the female could very easily become impregnated and have a long term problem on her hands long after the male has moved along. Therefore the biology of "why" is simple. Males have the capacity, the drive and the ability to walk away. It's written in the genes to do just this. There is no genetic or natural benefit for the male to impregnate a female then stop impregnating other females. To do so runs counter to the biological programs that populate the planet. Meanwhile, the female to her benefit or harm will tend the nest and raise the young.
To learn how mating strategies relate to physical attraction, building relationships and being more attractive to the opposite sex you probably would enjoy my video, Irresistible Attraction: Secrets of Personal Magnetism.
WASHINGTON (AP) --Matrimonial lore says husbands never remember marital spats and wives never forget. A new study suggests a reason: Women's brains are wired both to feel and to recall emotions more keenly than the brains of men.
A team of psychologists tested groups of women and men for their ability to recall or recognize highly evocative photographs three weeks after first seeing them and found that the women's recollections were 10 percent to 15 percent more accurate.
The study, appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also used MRI scans to image the subjects' brains as they were exposed to the pictures. It found that the women's neural responses to emotional scenes were much more active than the men's.
Turhan Canli, an assistant professor of psychology at State University of New York Stony Brook, said the study shows that a woman's brain is better organized to perceive and remember emotions.
"The wiring of emotional experience and the coding of that experience into memory is much more tightly integrated in women than in men," said Canli, the lead author of the study. "A larger percentage of the emotional stimuli used in the experiment were remembered by women than by men."
Other authors of the study are John E. Desmond, Zuo Zhao and John D. E. Gabrieli, all of Stanford University.
The findings are consistent with earlier research that found differences in the workings of the minds of women and men, said Diane F. Halpern, director of the Berger Institute for Work, Family, and Children and a professor of psychology at Claremont McKenna College in California.
Halpern said the study "makes a strong link between cognitive behavior and a brain structure that gets activated" when exposed to emotional stimuli.
"It advances our understanding of the link between cognition and the underlying brain structures," she said. "But it doesn't mean that those are immutable, ... that they can't change with experience."
Halpern said the study also supports earlier findings that women, in general, have a better autobiographical memory for anything, not just emotional events.
She said the study supports the folkloric idea that a wife has a truer memory for marital spats than does her husband.
"One reason for that is that it has more meaning for women and they process it a little more," said Halpern. "But you can't say that we've found the brain basis for this, because our brains are constantly changing."
In the study, Canli and his colleagues individually tested the emotional memory of 12 women and 12 men using a set of pictures. Some of the pictures were ordinary, and others were designed to evoke strong emotions.
Each of the subjects viewed the pictures and graded them on a three-point scale ranging from "not emotionally intense" to "extremely emotionally intense."
As the subjects viewed the pictures, images were being taken of their brains using magnetic resonance imaging. This measures neural blood flow and can identify portions of the brain that are active.
Canli said women and men had distinctively different emotional responses to the same photos. For instance, the men would see a gun and call it neutral, but for women it would be "highly, highly negative" and evoke strong emotions.
Neutral pictures showed such things as a fireplug, a book case or an ordinary landscape.
The pictures most often rated emotionally intense showed dead bodies, gravestones and crying people. A picture of a dirty toilet prompted a strong emotional response, especially from the women subjects, Canli said.
All the test subjects returned to the lab three weeks later and were surprised to learn that they would now be asked to remember the pictures they had seen. Canli said they were not told earlier that they would be asked to recall pictures from the earlier session.
In a memory test tailored for each person, they were asked to pick out pictures that they earlier rated as "extremely emotionally intense." The pictures were mixed among 48 new pictures. Each image was displayed for less than three seconds.
"For pictures that were highly emotional, men recalled around 60 percent and women were at about 75 percent," said Canli.
Canli said the study may help move science closer to finding a biological basis to explain why clinical depression is much more common in women than in men.
Canli said a risk factor for depression is rumination, or dwelling on a memory and reviewing it time after time. The study illuminates a possible biological basis for rumination, he said.
Young men who quickly react to stress with anger are at three times the normal risk of developing premature heart disease, according to a Johns Hopkins study of more than 1,000 physicians. Additionally, such men – who said they expressed or concealed their anger, became irritable or engaged in gripe sessions – were five times more likely than their calmer counterparts to have an early heart attack even without a family history of heart disease. Results are published in the April 22 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.
"In this study, hot tempers predicted disease long before other traditional risk factors like diabetes and hypertension became apparent," says Patricia P. Chang, M.D., lead author of the study and a cardiology fellow. "The most important thing angry young men can do is get professional help to manage their tempers, especially since previous studies have shown that those who already have heart disease get better with anger management."
Chang and colleagues analyzed data from the Johns Hopkins Precursors Study, a long-term investigation of 1,337 medical students who were enrolled at Hopkins between 1948 and 1964 and who continue to be followed. In medical school and through the follow-up period, information on family history and health behaviors has been collected. For this report, the investigators tracked 1,055 men for an average of 36 years following medical school to examine the risk of premature and total cardiovascular disease associated with anger responses to stress during early adult life. During medical school and in 1992, all participants were given a "nervous tension" questionnaire that sought clues to how they responded to undue pressure or stress. Expressed or concealed anger, irritability and gripe sessions were the three responses defined as indicating the most anger. Responding to the questionnaire during medical school, 229 men said they expressed or concealed their anger, 169 said they engaged in gripe sessions and 99 said they were irritable. Twenty-one men reported the highest level of anger (all three items) in response to stress.
By age 76, 205 men (35 percent) had developed cardiovascular disease, with an average onset at age 56. Of those, 145 men had coronary heart disease (94 with heart attack) and 59 reported stroke. Seventy-seven men (8 percent) had premature cardiovascular disease, with an average onset at age 49. Of those, 56 had coronary heart disease (34 with heart attack) and 13 reported premature stroke.
"Although the number of heart events was small, the incidence of cardiovascular disease was significantly higher for those with the highest level of anger compared with those with lower levels of anger," Chang says, adding that it's unclear if the findings apply to women or non-whites. Although it's not known how anger contributes to heart disease, Chang says, evidence points to stress-related release of extra catecholamines, compounds occurring naturally in the body that serve as hormones or transmitters of messages. These substances, such as adrenaline, prepare the body to meet emergencies such as cold, fatigue and shock, by constricting blood vessels and forcing the heart to work harder to supply the body with fresh blood.
The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Archives of Internal Medicine, Apr. 22, 2002. For more information, please see Hot Responders.
Beware, guys: your wife's job may be hazardous to your health. In a study by the University of Chicago sociologist Ross Stolzenberg, it was found that the husbands of women who worked more than 40 hours a week were significantly less healthy than other married men.
His research showed that long hours of work by husbands had no harmful effect on the health of their wives, employed or not.
Stolzenberg's analysis, published recently in the American Journal of Sociology, is based on survey data collected in 1986 from 2,867 adults, including their spouses, as part of the Americans' Changing Lives survey conducted by the University of Michigan. Study participants were interviewed again three years later.
In both surveys participants were asked to assess their overall health on a scale that ranged from "excellent" to "poor". (Researchers have consistently found that these kinds of general self-ratings are more accurate than a doctor's evaluation). The surveys also asked for information about employment, hours worked, and other data.
Confirmed: Marriage is healthy. Both married men and married women were significantly more likely to report that they were in good health than were single people, if other important factors held constant.
Similarly, working long hours had no perceptible effects on the health of either men or women. The additional time on the job seemed to boost the well-being of men.
The surprise came when the effect of a wife's employment on her husband was examined. "Fewer than 40 hours of work per week by wives has no effect on husbands' health, but more than 40 hours has substantial negative effect," Stolzenberg reported.
Why? Stolzenberg says a big reason is that husbands and wives generally still have different roles in a marriage - and maintaining the family's health largely remains the woman's job.
Adapted from an article by Richard Morin from the Washington Post which appeared in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune January 2, 2002.
In the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, a character dies of a fatal heart attack brought on by fear. In the story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, legend has it that a supernatural hound will kill the head of the Baskerville family. A greedy relative who wants him dead to claim the family inheritance finds a dog and gets it to howl each night. Baskerville, with his weak heart, believes the dog is the hound from hell, and dies of a heart attack.
University of California San Diego sociologist David Phillips had read the famous story as a child and wondered about the extreme psychological stress it would take to trigger a heart attack.
How to prove it? Phillips needed a superstition to test the theory that fear could actually trigger a heart attack.
In Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese, the words for the number 4 and death are pronounced almost identically. In China and Japan, 4 is left out of phone numbers and elevators because it evokes such fear. Phillips explains that in the U.S., many people of Chinese and Japanese descent feel the same anxiety. Especially if they are ill on the fourth day of the month.
The research team turned to U.S. death certificates to see if they could find a pattern in the number of death on the fourth of the month. They looked at the computerized records for more than 200,000 people of Chinese and Japanese descent and more than 47 million white Americans who had died between 1973 and 1998.
When the team focused in on heart disease patients, they found a surge of heart attack deaths, 13%, among the people of Chinese and Japanese descent on the fourth day of the month. In California, where large populations of Chinese and Japanese settled, the effect was even bigger, an astounding 27%.
The death certificates for white Americans showed no such jump.
The study, which appears in the British Medical Journal, was not designed to find out why those deaths occurred. Yet Phillips wonders if the surge in deaths can be attributed to the "Baskerville effect". He says that apprehension may trigger changes in the body, such as a spike in blood pressure or irregular heartbeats, which can lead to a heart attack.
Source: This article is adapted from a story by Kathleen Fackelmann which appeared in the USA Today December 24, 2001
Why did drivers go without seat belts before it became the law? Why would most people choose a 50 percent chance of winning $100 before they'd take a 60 percent chance at winning $90? A Harvard professor once calculated that spending six minutes in a canoe cuts 15 minutes off your expected life span. To which a paddler is likely to say: Go for it!
"All risk is subjective", says Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon and president of Decision Research, a consulting firm in Eugene, Ore., that specializes in risk assessment. "You can't be purely rational."
Slovic has spent his career researching the reasons why people continually make irrational decisions, and why those choices may not be as dumb as scientists think.
Risk, according to Slovik, doesn't exist "out there", waiting to be measured. It's a concept invented by the human mind to help people cope with danger.
People approach risk in two ways. One is based on experience, intuition and feelings. The otheris based on data, analysis and reason. The first is a gut reaction; the second is epidemiology, toxicology and statistical odds.
There is wisdom is both approaches.
Emotional reactions at times have their benefits. When walking in the woods, you see a narrow squigly line on the ground. Snake or stick?
"You don't do a risk-benefit analysis," said David Ropeik, director of risk communication at the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis. "You jump out of the way."
But, emotion untempered by knowledge indeed has its perils. If you drive to Los Angeles because you're afraid to fly, you actually increase your risk factor. Indiscriminate use of antibiotics only increases the risk of resistant bacteria.
Slovic and Ropeik coined the term Dread Factor to use for the series of hot buttons that make some hazards seem scarier than their statistical odds of happening. The recent Sept. 11 attacks, and the anthrax fallout pushed every one of these hot buttons.
Risks score high on the Dread Scale if:
They're New. Risks lose some of their punch once they become familiar. Anthrax risk is now scarier than influenza.
They kill - and kill in awful ways. "It's worse to be eaten by a shark than to die in your sleep of a heart attack," Ropeik said. "If we feared based on reason, we'd fear the heart attack more, because it's much more likely."
They're in the news. Global warming didn't go away, it's just off the radar screen right now.
They're fraught with uncertainty. "Not only do we not understand anthrax, but who knows what they'll try next?" says Slovic.
They're more catastrophic than chronic. Hazards that kill alot of people at once - plane crashes - are more dreadful than hazards such as diabetes that kill many more people over time.
They're out of our control. That's why some people are buying gas masks.
They could happen to me. Terrorism used to be thought of as happening somewhere else.
Source: Adapted from an article which appeared in the December 2, 2001 Minneapolis Star-Tribune by Don Colburn.
This week a fascinating piece of research reveals that men who look at beautiful women (young women, no less) experience stimulation...in the reward circuits of the brain. These are the same parts of the brain that are stimulated by cocaine use. What is particularly interesting is that the SPECT imaging reports confirm speculation that these are evolutionary brain functions, and not socially evolved experiences. A great deal of important information was brought forward. Here's what MIT's Sloan School did and what they found:
Researchers showed a group of heterosexual men in their mid 20's pictures of men and women of varying attractiveness, while measuring the brain's responses through computer imaging. The experiment used a series of 80 photos of faces that fell into four standard categories: beautiful females, average females, beautiful males and average males.
The beautiful women were found to activate the same "reward circuits" as food and cocaine do.
The men had negative reactions to pictures of good looking males, suggesting they were threatened by them.
It looks like there can be a difference between what a brain "likes," an image that is judged to be attractive, and what the brain "wants," something that is regarded as a reward in and of itself," Professor Hans Breiter said. "It's particularly interesting that the attractive male faces actually produced what could be considered an aversion response, even though they had been recognized as attractive."
Breiter said evidence that stimulates these primal brain circuits has never been shown before. He said the findings counter arguments that beauty is nothing more than the product of society's values.
Other researchers not involved in the study agreed that what was once thought to be a very high level of thought (determining what is attractive to a person) is actually very primal and a new major consideration in motivation.
Do you suffer from the classic fear of speaking in public? Maybe your brain is a scaredy cat!
Using PET scans to see how the brain processes information when a person has to speak before a group in public or in private, researchers from Sweden to Boston found that in people with social phobia, there is much more activity in part of the brain considered to be an older danger-recognition system.
Among the people who do not have social phobia, the front part of the brain that is involved in rational thought is more active, according to Maria Tillfors of Uppsala University in Sweden. This research was reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry.
Source: Compiled by St. Paul Pioneer Press staff writer Rhoda Fukushima from wire service reports.
In a study recently published in the journal Circulation, it was reported that six months of moderate, steadily increasing exercise can undo the effects of 30 years of aging, at least when it comes to aerobic fitness.
The study was a follow-up to a 1966 study in which a group of 20 year old men performed physical tests, spent 3 weeks in bed, then were put through a six month program of moderate endurance training.
In 1996, researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dalls examined five of the men. Only two had continued to exercise regularly; all had gained weight and had doubled on average their body fat.
The subjects were enrolled in an aerobic fitness program. Starting slowly, they built up over six months working out 5 hours a week.
This training "restored 100 percent of the age-associated decline in aerobic power," the article said.
However, it didn't help them lose significant amounts of weight or body fat.
Source: Adapted from an article which appeared in the Minneapolis Star Tribune October 4, 2001.
Isn't starting a new school year stressful enough? Now a University of Connecticut researcher suggests teachers may be more at risk for developing autoimmune diseases than people of other occupations.
An examination of 11 years of death certificates revealed that teachers were more likely to die from a variety of diseases in which the patients' own immune systems attack their organs.
Findings were published in the July 30 Journal Rheumatology. The findings tend to support the theory that diseases such as multiple sclerosis and lupus may be triggered by exposure to infectious diseases, according to Stephen Walsh, assistant professor of community medicine at the University of Connecticut Health Center, and author of the study.
Overall mortality from 13 autoimmune diseases, which tend to be chronic but are usually not fatal, was 2.3 percent for teachers, compared to 1.7 percent for other professions.
When researchers examined the data more carefully, they found teachers ages 35 to 44 were more likely to die from autoimmune disorders than were their peers in other professions.
One explanation is that teachers are more likely to be exposed to an infectious agent early in their careers than are others.
High school teachers had a higher death rate from autoimmune diseases than elementary school teachers, Walsh said.
High school teachers may be more likely to have exposure to the Epstein-Barr virus, which causes mononucleosis, a condition commonly afflicting teenagers. Other studies have indicated the virus in the onset of multiple sclerosis and lupus, he said.
Source: Adapted from an article by William Hathaway of the Hartford Courant which appeared in the St. Paul Pioneer Press September 3, 2001.
NEW YORK, Jul 26 (Reuters Health) -- It has been known that people remember faces of their own race better than they remember faces of other races. Now researchers have moved to discover the changes in the brain that underlie that phenomenon.
In a study performed by Dr. Jennifer L. Eberhardt and colleagues from Stanford University in California, researchers asked 19 men--9 black and 10 white--to look at pictures of faces of people from both races while they monitored participants' brain activity with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Researchers found that when the study participants looked at faces of their own race, a specific area of the brain 'lit up' on the MRI. But when they looked at pictures of faces of another race, the brain area did not activate to the same degree, according to the report in the August issue of Nature Neuroscience.
"Our prediction was that you would get greater activation in these areas for same-race faces compared to other-race faces," Eberhardt said. "This is what we found, and the results were pretty similar among the groups of participants."
The part of the brain that the researchers targeted is called the fusiform region. "It is an area that is activated when someone looks at a face, but not while they look at other objects or even other parts of the body," Eberhardt explained.
"It is also activated when a person looks at an object about which they are an expert," Eberhardt said, noting that a bird watcher's fusiform region might be activated if he looks at a bird.
In a test designed to measure the participants' ability to recall whether they had seen a picture before, the individuals were asked to look at pictures of both races. Then some of the pictures were shown to them again, but were mixed with some pictures that they had not seen before.
According to the researchers, African-American participants did well in recalling whether they had previously seen a face, regardless of race--although the best memory performance in the study was among black participants looking at black faces.
White people, however, were not as successful in recalling which pictures of African Americans they had seen before.
According to a study published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine, people who attend weekly religious services develop healthier lifestyles than less-frequent worshipers. They tend to be more physically active, drink less and don't smoke - perhaps because they have healthy role models in the congregation?
Adapted from an article which appeared in the July 2001 Ladies' Home Journal
A recent study at Cornell University found that working in a moderately noisy office environment - with phones ringing, people talking and the sound of drawers opening and closing - may lead to heart disease. The noise caused heart-damaging stress hormones to become elevated.
Adapted from an article which appeared in the July 2001 issue of the Ladies' Home Journal
The "war room" setting, with no walls and equipped with central workstations, appears to encourage communication and collaboration.
Researchers at the University of Michigan compared the productivity of software development teams in war room and traditional settings and found that workers in open offices were twice as productive as others.
"Although the war room teammates were not looking forward to working in close quarters, over time they realized the benefits of having people at hand, for coordination, problem solving and learning," explains Stephanie Teasley, Ph.D., an assistant research scientist at Michigan, who presented her findings this winter at an Association for Computing Machinery conference.
An added benefit over traditionally arranged offices: The feeling that you can't slack off knowing your every move is being watched by an entire office.
Adapted from an article by Linnea Leaver which appeared in the June 2001 issue of Psychology Today.
To learn more about strategic movement, The Psychology of Persuasion provides all you need to know to master it!
Is it the edgy jerks who get all the promotions? Is their advice regarded as more important than yours? Recent studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology show that an individual's expressions of anger can cause an observer to confer more status and power on him or her.
Larissa Z. Tiedens, Ph.D., an assistant professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and author of the study, had previously determined that high status individuals are more likely to feel anger. "This seemed to be the next logical step," she says, "seeing whether people watching someone express anger believe that that person deserves status."
In one example, Tiedens asked employees of a software company to rate each co-worker on how often he or she expressed certain emotions and how much they could learn from that person. Also, the group manager noted how likely he would be to promote each employee. Those who expressed the most anger were more likely to be promoted and perceived as more knowledgeable.
Those of us in a position to grant status, at work or when voting, aren't always aware of our biases. "We often make inferences on emotional expressions that may or may not hold true," says Tiedens.
Adapted from an article by W. Eric Martin which appeared in the June 2001 issue of Psychology Today.
A happy marriage can apparently help protect women from heart attacks and strokes after menopause, when their risk rises sharply.
A bad match also can make its mark. Ultrasound on carotid arteries and the aorta show a much higher risk for dying of cardiovascular disease.
These new findings may shed some light on why some studies report that marriage is shown to be beneficial, while others don't. Wives are typically grouped together, whether happily or unhappily married. That "obscures the relationship between marriage and health," says Wendy Troxel, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, who presented her findings at the American Psychosomatic Society meeting.
In a study with psychologist Karen Matthews, 490 women were followed from premenopausal years in their 40s to at least five years after menopause. About 3/4 were married. Each married woman was asked to rate how satisfied she was with several areas of her marriage. Blood pressure, body mass index and cholesterol levels were checked.
After menopause, the women all got body scans, looking for early signs of cardiovascular disease.
Findings:
Before menopause, the unhappily married women were significantly worse off on heeart disease risk factors such as high blood pressure and cholesterol than either the happily marrieds or the single women.
After menopause, the happily married women had the best health, as seen on body scans.
Single women were significantly worse off, and so were women in unhappy marriages.
"Women might think they're shrugging off a miserable relationship, but their body feels it," Troxel says.
Psychologist Janice Kiecolt-Glaser, known for her studies on verbal conflicts in marriage, states, "Women are much more physically responsive to interactions in marriage. They remember the arguments in detail, and they also remember the positive exchanges more vividly than men."
Adapted from an article by Marilyn Elias which appeared in the USA Today March 12, 2001.
Having served 22 years for a murder he says he didn't commit, Terry Harrington is hoping he might be a free man soon due to new evidence admitted in a retrial: his brain.
"Brain Fingerprinting", a new technique developed by Lawrence Farwell, Ph.D., a psychiatrist with Brain Wave Science in Fairfield Iowa, measures brain activity - or inactivity - following attempts to trigger memories.
During the procedure, Farwell monitors the brain's electrical activity while the subject is exposed to words or pictures that may or may not have significant meaning to him. A criminal suspect may be asked about events surrounding the crime. Both real and false circumstances are displayed on a computer monitor while brain activity is recorded.
"If the suspect recognizes the details of the crime, this indicates that he has a record of the crime stored in his brain - including things that only the perpetrator would know," says Farwell. Someone who was innocent would exhibit no special brain activity, because their brain lacks the context that would make a particular circumstance or answer meaningful to them. Harrington's brain showed no memory of the crime scene, but did show memories of attending a rock concert with friends the same night, which matches Harrington's alibi.
Farwell's research is slated for publication in the Journal of Forensic Studies. Farwell states that his research on the technique found that it determined with 99% accuracy whether the six study subjects had participated in the event in question. Farwell predicts the technique will someday be widely used. "When you have a crime scene, fingerprints or DNA are available in only about one percent of cases," he says. "But the brain of the perpetrator is always there, planning, carrying out and recording the crime."
Adapted from an article written by W. Eric Martin for Psychology Today March/April 2001 issue.
According to a study presented recently at an American Stroke Association Conference, your personality may have quite a significant effect on how you recover from a stroke.
"Personality is an important factor in recovering from strokes, and we need to respect and appreciate it early in the diagnosis and treatment process," says Lynn Grattan, an associate professor o neurology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine.
Grattan says that those least likely to recover well are those with the personality traits of shyness, inhibition, and those lacking in self-confidence.
"They tended to become more withdrawn, had difficulty negotiating interpersonal relationships with the rehabilitative staff and family members, were more likely to be impulsive, impatient and moody, and less likely to apply good self-discipline in the rehabilitative process," she says.
Personality seems to be important because personal effort is critical to success. Four personality qualities in particular predicted poor recovery, Grattan says. Personality type mattered more than how severe the stroke was or where in the brain it occurred. People were less likely to recover well if they were more self-conscious, more gregarious, less straightforward or less deliberate.
All study participants were within normal ranges for all the personality qualities, and none suffered from diagnosed psychiatric problems, say the researchers.
"Rather than fighting the personality, we should be working with it," Grattan says.
Gregarious people seem to have so much difficulty because much of thier self-esteem is built on being very physical, spontaneous and outgoing, which is hard-hit by the stroke. Those who are not straightforward may have trouble confronting the truth about what's happened to them.
Those who are not as deliberate have a hard time exerting self-control and focusing, major obstacles if trying to reach a difficult goal.
"It's alot of work to recover from a stroke," she says. The findings would not be relevant for those who have suffered a more severe stroke, since the higher level of dementia that can result presents a bigger problem, one than cannot be overcome with any single personality trait.
Adapted from an article by Julia McNamee Neenan, which appeared in the Mpls. Star Tribune on March 5, 2001.
People judge new acquaintances by their hairstyles, according to Marianne LaFrance, a Yale University researcher.
LaFrance, a professor of psychology and of women's and gender studies, recently directed a study on how hairstyles affect people's first impressions.
LaFrance said, "We found that different hairstyles quickly lead others to 'see' different kinds of people". Participants in the study looked at a computer screen showing faces with different hairstyles flashing before their eyes. The people had less than 4 seconds to look at each photo and record their impression of that person in 10 different categories, including things such as confidence, socio-economic status, and sexiness.
Photographs showed the faces with 4 different hairstyles and one baseline look, basically a close-up that cropped any hair from view. The photographs were black and white, so color was not a factor, other than having light or dark hair.
"One of the really stunning things we found was an incredible degree of consensus by men and women in their opinions of men and women," said LaFrance.
Key findings:
Short, highlighted hairstyles on women show confidence, but the least sexy. Long straight blond hair is perceived as sexy and belonging to affluent and narrow-minded women. Medium length casual looking styles on women with dark hair are seen as signs of intelligence, good naturedness and carelessness.
Men with short, highlighted hair are perceived as confident and sexy - and the most self-centered. Medium length and a side part are seen as intelligent and affluent, but also signal narrow mindedness. Long hair on a man gives the impression of good naturedness, but also careless and unpleasant.
Women with long, dark curly hair, and men with medium length, center-parted hair didn't dominate any characteristic.
Whether impressions were formed based on personal experience, celebrities, or history is still unclear, LaFrance added.
Earlier this year, LaFrance studied the effect of bad hair days on self-esteem. The study found people feel less smart, less capable, more embarrassed and less sociable when their hair is out of place.
Adapted from an article by Samantha Critchell for the Associated Press, which appeared in the Mpls. Star-Tribune Mar. 2, 2001.
If you wanted to catch someone telling a lie, should you follow your nose? Follow their nose instead. Scientists at the Smell and Taste Treatment and Research Foundation in Chicago found that when you lie, chemicals called catecholamines are released, causing tissue inside the nose to swell.
So, the nose really does get bigger when you lie ala Pinocchio - even if it is just a fraction of a millimeter!
Source: Adapted from an article which appeared in the February issue of Mademoiselle magazine.
Doctors have long recommended that people who are battling depression should perform regular exercise. Now, a study shows that regular exercise may even work just as well as the popular antidepressant Zoloft.
A Duke University Medical Center study found that supervised exercise three times a week for four months was just as effective as Zoloft, a depression medicine. After six additional months, patients who exercised weren't as likely to relapse than patients who did not exercise. "A modest exercise program is an effective, robust treatment for patients with a major depression who are positively inclined to participate in it," according to the study, which was published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine.
The study included 156 people age 50 and older. All had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder and had mild to severe symptoms. The patients who exercised attended workout sessions three days a week for 16 weeks. Each session began with a 10-minute warm-up, and then 30 minutes of continuous cycling, brisk walking, or jogging.
According to James A. Blumenthal, Ph.D., professor of medical psychology at Duke and the study's senior author, says exercise may have proven more potent than a pill because it gave the patients self-confidence. He said, "People felt a greater sense of achievement, a sense of being in control and mastering something".
Source: Adapted from an article that appeared in Better Homes and Gardens, February 2001 issue.
Research has concluded that the higher a woman's weight in late middle age, the lower her net worth. In contrast, men, especially really heavy ones, may be worth more than their normal-weight counterparts.
In a federally funded study involving more than 7,000 men and women, researchers collected individual net worth data for men and women between the ages of 51 and 60 and divided them into groups according to weight. The first group was normal or slightly overweight. They had a BMI (body mass index) under 30. The second group was mildly obese, with a BMI of 30 to 35. The third group was obese or severely obese, with a BMI of 35 or above. (example: a person who weighs 180 pounds and is 5 feet 11 inches tall has a BMI of 25; at 5 feet 5 and 180 pounds, a person's BMI would be 30; and at 5 feet and 180 pounds, BMI would be 35.)
In 1992, the study found that women with the highest BMI had an individual net worth 40 percent lower than their normal-weight counterparts.
Interestingly, the men with the highest BMI had the greatest net worth; over $201,000, compared with the thinnest group of men, who reported a net worth just over $146,000.
In 1998, when the participants were surveyed again, the largest women reported an individual net worth of $90,303, compared with $225,973 for the thinnest normal-weight group. There was little difference among men: The fattest had a net worth of $238,000, compared with $244,000 for the normal-weight group.
According to Stephanie J. Fonda, a member of the study team, researchers controlled for marital status and found that net worth for married men was not affected by obesity, while it was for married women.
Fonda said there was speculation that this may be due to the more limited "marriage market" obese women may face. In any case, Fonda said, the study is, "suggestive that obese women are further stigmatized."
Adapted from an article from the Washington Post by Sandra G. Boodman which appeared in the Mpls. Star-Tribune December 16, 2000.
Misinformation is more likely to be remembered than the real thing, as found in a small study with 100 college students. Peter Frost, a researcher with Rivier College in Nashua, N.H., states that while the memory of truthful information tends to blur as time goes by, "not only do people recall more misinformation over time, but they tend to judge it as more vivid."
The false information does take time to register: it comes to mind more readily a while after the event than immediately after it. The 100 college students were asked to remember facts from a series of slides showing a crime. They also heard a narrative with some inaccurate information about what the slides protrayed. After a week, they were as apt to remember as fact what they heard in the false narrative as what was seen in the slides.
Such research helps explain how "false memories" of events can become established, Frost says. See his study in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
Adapted from an article that appeared in the USA Today December 12, 2000.
Scientists can now say they know where love originates in the brain - that is, what part of the brain is involved.
In a study led by London researchers Andreas Bartels and Seymour Zeki of University College, brain scans were performed on 17 students who claimed to be "truly and madly in love."
As the subjects were shown pictures of the one they loved, four specific areas of their brains lit up. The areas were all within zones previously associated with pleasure: the middle insula, the anterior cingulate cortex, the putamen and the caudate nucleus.
"..fear, anger and sadness, showed activity in other parts of the brain that do not overlap with the ones we found activated for romantic love," Bartels said. "This suggests that there is a functional specialization in the brain for different emotional states."
In relation, researchers also observed why people in love sometimes have trouble thinking straight. The brain scans showed that parts of the brain become less active during feelings of love. These areas include the parietal, temporal and prefrontal cortex in the right side of the brain - areas associated with higher mental functions such as memory and attention.
Adapted from an article that appeared in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune November 15, 2000.
Scientists at the University of Virginia are reporting that promiscuous species of monkeys appear to have stronger immune systems than less sexually active ones.
20 years of data on 41 primate species from zoos around the world was studied and they found that the most promiscuous ones have high levels of basal white blood cells, the body's first line of defense against infection. Monogamous species, such as the white handed gibbon have lower levels.
Charles Nunn, a biology researcher who led the study, stated, "The most sexually active species of primates may have evolved elevated immune systems as a defense mechanism against disease." The study was published in the journal of Science.
Humans have white blood cell counts similar to those in primarily monogamous species, the researchers said.
According to Jeffrey Frelinger, professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of North Carolina, said the correlation is interesting, but he cautioned that the study doesn't prove cause and effect. He also noted that the study looks at total white cells, but doesn't examine their ability to fight infection.
Adapted from an article that appeared in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune November 15, 2000.
In a study performed by David Perrett, professor of psychology from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, it was demonstrated that the human brain perceives personality traits as it views faces.
Images of actor Harrison Ford were flashed side by side. Audience members were asked which would they be likelier to lend money?
But the two pictures weren't identical. One captured the true Hollywood hero, with his classic chiseled jaw, strong brow line and serious demeanor. The other picture was subtly different. Computer magic had softened Ford's brow, rounded that sturdy chin and puffed his lips a tad.
Overwhelmingly, the "feminized" Ford was judged more trustworthy and got a thumbs-up for a loan.
Protruding jaw lines and thinner lips are masculine traits and often are perceived as signs of strength, emotional coldness and untrustworthiness. Feminine faces are softer and often are equated with honesty and warmth, whether or not that really is the case.
"We're beginning to realize that complex social behavior can rely on very discrete neural systems," said Perrett, the keynote speaker at a conference of brain scientists at the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. "Where they are and how they work is intensely interesting for neuro-scientists, and the public, too."
The brain's complex circuitry detects features, recognizes familiar faces and imbues personality traits in fleeting milliseconds, he said. "We do so many things with faces," Perrett said. "We can recognize faces; we can recognize emotion. These are all different systems in the brain."
Adapted from an article that appeared June 25, 2000 in the San Antonio Express-News
Psychologists have observed that people who have a good relationship tend to "mirror" each other's posture and facial expressions as they communicate. However, an Ohio State University study reported in a recent issue of Psychology Today showed that consciously mimicking others can actually improve our relationships with them.
College students were asked to sit individually with researchers and discuss pictures. The researchers consciously adopted body postures and mannerisms similar to some subjects, while remaining neutral with others. Afterward, students were asked to rate the researchers in terms of likability. Students whose posture and mannerisms were mirrored rated researchers much more likable than students who sat with a neutral researcher. However, the psychologists conducting the study said that insincere mimickry can backfire. Mirroring works best when it occurs spontaneously, as a result of empathy (for example, looking sad when a friend is crying), rather than being used as a way to manipulate people into liking you.
As reported by the Office Professional, December 1999
It's long been assumed that the human brain stops growing in adulthood, with cells decreasing in number over the years. But in a new report in Science, researchers at Princeton University challenged this notion. They were able to demonstrate that in the cerebral cortex of adult macaques, plenty of freshly minted brain cells arrive daily. This may help monkeys keep learning throughout their lives. Of course, monkeys are not people; yet we are all primates. Marian Diamond, a neuroscientist at UC Berkeley, adds that the human brain maintains its ability to learn, right into old age. Retrieval from memory does, alas, slow down. Thus you'll do fine if you decide to take up a new study, provided you can find your car keys.
As reported by the UC Berkeley Wellness Letter, January 2000
When you're looking for a word, using your hands may help jog your memory, according to a study in the American Journal of Psychology.
Researchers found that people who held onto a bar to keep hands still had more trouble thinking of complex words than those who were allowed to move their hands freely.
So the next time you're tongue-tied, go ahead and gesture - a few hand waves may take you a long way.
