By Greg Miller In the mid-19th century, some European doctors became fascinated with a plant-derived drug recently imported from India. Cannabis had been used as medicine for millennia in Asia, and physicians were keen to try it with their patients. No less an authority than Sir John Russell Reynolds, the house physician to Queen Victoria and later president of the Royal College of Physicians in London, extolled the medical virtues of cannabis in The Lancet in 1890. “In almost all painful maladies I have found Indian hemp by far the most useful of drugs,” Reynolds wrote. Like other doctors of his day, Reynolds thought cannabis might help reduce the need for opium-based painkillers, with their potential for abuse and overdose. “The bane of many opiates and sedatives is this, that the relief of the moment, the hour, or the day, is purchased at the expense of to-morrow’s misery,” he wrote. “In no one case to which I have administered Indian hemp, have I witnessed any such results.” More than 125 years later, the misery caused by opioids is clearer than ever, and there are new hints that cannabis could be a viable alternative. Some clinical studies suggest that the plant may have medical value, especially for difficult-to-treat pain conditions. The liberalization of marijuana laws in the United States has also allowed researchers to compare overdoses from painkiller prescriptions and opioids in states that permit medical marijuana versus those that don’t. Yet following up on those hints isn’t easy. Clinical studies face additional hurdles because the plant is listed on Schedule I, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA’s) list of the most dangerous drugs. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22832 - Posted: 11.04.2016

Ramin Skibba A large, multi-lab replication study has found no evidence to validate one of psychology’s textbook findings: the idea that people find cartoons funnier if they are surreptitiously induced to smile. But an author of the original report — published nearly three decades ago — says that the new analysis has shortcomings, and may not represent a direct replication of his work. In 1988, Fritz Strack, a psychologist now at the University of Würzburg, Germany, and colleagues found that people who held a pen between their teeth, which induces a smile, rated cartoons as funnier than did those who held a pen between their lips, which induced a pout, or frown1. Strack chose cartoons from Gary Larson's classic 1980s series, The Far Side. Strack’s study has been quoted as a classic demonstration of what’s known as the ‘facial feedback hypothesis’ — the idea that facial expressions can influence a person’s own emotional state. The paper has been cited more than a thousand times, and has been followed by other research into facial feedback. In 2011, for example, researchers reported that injections of Botox, which affects the muscles of facial expression, dampen emotional responses2. But as part of a growing trend to reproduce famous psychology findings, a group of scientists revisited the experiment. They describe the collective results of 17 experiments, with a total of nearly 1,900 participants, in a paper published on 26 October in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science3. © 2016 Macmillan Publishers Limited,

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 22831 - Posted: 11.04.2016

By Dan Hurley The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed 89 cases of the paralyzing disease in the United States through September. A 6-year-old boy suspected of having AFM died in Seattle on Sunday, the first death believed to be caused by the disease. One of the drugs in development, pocapavir, was used briefly on a few patients during a 2014 outbreak of AFM under a compassionate-use exception that allows extremely sick patients to be given unapproved drugs without the usual kinds of placebo-controlled trials required by the Food and Drug Administration. “There were a couple of kids who got pocapavir in the Colorado outbreaks,” said Benjamin Greenberg, a neurologist who has treated children with AFM at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas. “It had relatively weak but measurable impact on viral replication. A larger study would definitely be warranted. We'll take anything we can get.” Although the CDC says no cause has been conclusively linked to AFM, many researchers suspect a family of viruses known as enteroviruses. “I have been studying enteroviruses for 40 years now,” said John Modlin, deputy director of the polio eradication program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. “If I had a child with acute flaccid myelitis, I would be on the phone in a second to the companies making these drugs.” © 1996-2016 The Washington Post

Keyword: Movement Disorders
Link ID: 22830 - Posted: 11.04.2016

By Kelly Servick Mark Hutchinson could read the anguish on the participants’ faces in seconds. As a graduate student at the University of Adelaide in Australia in the late 1990s, he helped with studies in which people taking methadone to treat opioid addiction tested their pain tolerance by dunking a forearm in ice water. Healthy controls typically managed to stand the cold for roughly a minute. Hutchinson himself, “the young, cocky, Aussie bloke chucking my arm in the water,” lasted more than 2 minutes. But the methadone patients averaged only about 15 seconds. “These aren’t wimps. These people are injecting all sorts of crazy crap into their arms. … But they were finding this excruciating,” Hutchinson says. “It just fascinated me.” The participants were taking enormous doses of narcotics. How could they experience such exaggerated pain? The experiment was Hutchinson’s first encounter with a perplexing phenomenon called opioid-induced hyperalgesia (OIH). At high doses, opioid painkillers actually seem to amplify pain by changing signaling in the central nervous system, making the body generally more sensitive to painful stimuli. “Just imagine if all the diabetic medications, instead of decreasing blood sugar, increased blood sugar,” says Jianren Mao, a physician and pain researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who has studied hyperalgesia in rodents and people for more than 20 years. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 22829 - Posted: 11.04.2016

Ian Sample Science editor The devastating impact of cigarette smoke on the body’s DNA has been laid bare by the first comprehensive study into the damage tobacco inflicts on human cells. People who smoke a pack of cigarettes each day for a year develop on average 150 extra mutations in every lung cell, and nearly 100 more mutations than usual in each cell of the voice box, researchers found. More still build up in the mouth, bladder, liver and other organs. While chemicals in tobacco smoke have long been known to raise the risk of at least 17 forms of cancer, the precise molecular mechanisms through which they mutate DNA and give rise to tumours in different tissues have never been clear. “This is about running down the root cause of cancers,” said David Phillips, a professor of environmental carcinogenesis at King’s College London and a co-author on the study. “By identifying the root causes, we gain the sort of knowledge we need to think more seriously about cancer prevention.” More than 70 of the 7,000 chemicals found in tobacco smoke are known to cause cancer. Some damage DNA directly, but others ramp up mutations in more subtle ways, often by disrupting the way cells function. The more mutations a cell acquires, the more likely it is to turn cancerous. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22828 - Posted: 11.04.2016

By Simon Makin Cerebral autopsy specimen of a patient diagosed having Alzheimer Disease. In the HE stain numerous plaque formations within the neuropil background are visible. Credit: WIKIPEDIA, CC BY-SA 3.0 On Monday Pres. Barack Obama proclaimed November “National Alzheimer's Disease Awareness Month.” The administration’s ambitious goal is to prevent and treat Alzheimer's by 2025. Although there are currently no approved therapies that slow or stop progression of the disease, several approaches are showing promise. In a study published today in Science Translational Medicine, a team from Merck Research Laboratories reports results of early human and animal trials of a drug called verubecestat, which targets the production of protein plaques associated with the disease. “It's a summary of the discovery and early-stage profiling of what we hope is going to be a new therapeutic for Alzheimer's,” says team leader Matthew Kennedy. “It represents well over a decade of investment in this project by many, many scientists.” Definitive conclusions will have to await the results of larger, ongoing phase III clinical trials to assess their efficacy, effectiveness and safety, but the results are promising, experts say. Verubecestat is a so-called BACE1 inhibitor. BACE1 (for Beta-site Amyloid precursor protein Cleaving Enzyme 1, aka beta-secretase 1) is an enzyme involved in producing amyloid beta (Ab), a protein that clumps together, eventually forming the plaques surrounding neurons that are the disease's key hallmark. The amyloid hypothesis of Alzheimer's proposes that the accumulation of amyloid beta aggregates in the brain drives a cascade of biological events leading to neurodegeneration. By blocking BACE1, the hope is this approach could prevent the buildup of these clumps in the first place. But until now, development of these drugs has been hindered by problems finding molecules with the right characteristics, and concerns over theoretical and actual side effects. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 22827 - Posted: 11.03.2016

By SABRINA TAVERNISE WASHINGTON — A decade after electronic cigarettes were introduced in the United States, use has flattened, sales have slowed and, this fall, NJoy, once one of the country’s biggest e-cigarette manufacturers, filed for bankruptcy. It is quite a reversal for an invention once billed as the biggest chance to end smoking as we know it and take aim at the country’s largest cause of preventable death. Use of the devices is slumping because they are not as good as cigarettes at giving a hit of nicotine. Dealing another strike against them, the country’s top public health authorities have sent an unwavering message: Vaping is dangerous. The warning is meant to stop people who have never smoked — particularly children — from starting to vape. But a growing number of scientists and policy makers say the relentless portrayal of e-cigarettes as a public health menace, however well intentioned, is a profound disservice to the 40 million American smokers who could benefit from the devices. Smoking kills more than 480,000 Americans a year. “We may well have missed, or are missing, the greatest opportunity in a century,” said David B. Abrams, senior scientist at the Truth Initiative, an antismoking group. “The unintended consequence is more lives are going to be lost.” American public health experts, led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, have long been suspicious of e-cigarettes. The possible risks of vaping are vast, officials warn, including the potential to open a dangerous new door to addiction for youth. Scientists will not know the full effect for years, so for now, they caution, be wary. But mounting evidence suggests vaping is far less dangerous than smoking, a fact that is rarely pointed out to the American public. Britain, a country with about the same share of smokers, has come to the opposite conclusion from the United States. This year, a prestigious doctors’ organization told the public that e-cigarettes were 95 percent less harmful than cigarettes. British health officials are encouraging smokers to switch. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 22826 - Posted: 11.03.2016

By Chelsea Whyte FACING a big problem and finding it hard to decide what to do? A sprinkling of disgust might boost your confidence. Common sense suggests that our confidence in the decisions we make comes down to the quality of the information available – the clearer that information, the more confident we feel. But it seems that the state of our body also guides us. Micah Allen at University College London and his colleagues showed 29 people a screen of dots moving in varied directions. They asked the volunteers which direction most of the spots were moving in, and how confident they were in their decisions. Before each task, the participants briefly saw a picture of a face on the screen. It was either twisted in disgust or had a neutral expression. Although this happened too quickly for the faces to be consciously perceived, the volunteers’ bodies reacted. Seeing disgust, which is a powerful evolutionary sign of danger, boosted the volunteers’ alertness, pushing up their heart rates and dilating their pupils. “When you induce disgust, high confidence becomes lower and low confidence becomes higher“ When shown a neutral face, the volunteers became less confident as the task got more difficult. As the movement of the dots became more varied, they were less sure of the main direction. But when they were shown the disgusted face, they reacted differently. In easy tasks, in which people were previously confident, they became more doubtful of their decisions. In more difficult tasks, their confidence grew. Neither face made any difference to the accuracy of their answers (eLife, doi.org/bsgd). © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Emotions; Attention
Link ID: 22825 - Posted: 11.03.2016

Sarah Boseley Health editor Hundreds of children and young people are to get treatment for chronic fatigue syndrome for the first time, to see whether methods that have proved highly successful in the Netherlands can be adopted by the NHS. Up to 2% of young people are affected by CFS, also known as myalgic encephalopathy (ME). But few get any treatment, and attempts to help have sometimes stoked the row over the causes of the condition. Activists on social media frequently denounce doctors who suggest that psychological issues play any part in the disease. Treatment given to young people in the Netherlands has had remarkable results, helping 63% recover within six months and return to school and a normal life, compared with 8% of those who had other care. The children are given cognitive behavioural therapy to understand and overcome the debilitating exhaustion that neither sleep nor rest can help. The sessions are conducted with a therapist over the internet, using Skype, diaries and questionnaires. This means children will be able to get treatment in their own homes in parts of the country where there is nothing currently available to them. Esther Crawley, a professor of child health at Bristol University, said she would argue that the trial she is leading is not controversial. “Paediatric CFS/ME is really important and common,” she said. “One per cent of children at secondary school are missing a day a week because of CFS/ME. Probably 2% of children are affected. They are teenagers who can’t do the things teenagers are doing.” © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 22824 - Posted: 11.03.2016

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Is use of antibiotics in infancy tied to childhood obesity? Some studies suggest so, but a new analysis suggests the link may be with infections, rather than antibiotics. Using records of a large health maintenance organization, researchers tracked 260,556 infants born from January 1997 through the end of March 2013. The database included details on antibiotic use, diagnosis and height and weight measurements from birth through age 18. The study is in Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology. The scientists compared children who had no infections and no antibiotic use in the first year of life with those who had untreated infections. They found that an infant with one untreated infection had a 15 percent increased risk for childhood obesity, and the risk increased to 40 percent in those with three untreated infections. But there was no difference in obesity risk between infants treated with antibiotics and those with a similar infection left untreated. In other words, infections, but not the use of antibiotics, were associated with childhood obesity. “If there is an infection during infancy, particularly a respiratory or ear infection, it should be treated,” said the lead author, Dr. De-Kun Li of the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research. “You shouldn’t avoid antibiotics because you are concerned about childhood obesity.” © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 22823 - Posted: 11.03.2016

Mo Costandi Stem cells obtained from patients with schizophrenia carry a genetic mutation that alters the ratio of the different type of nerve cells they produce, according to a new study by researchers in Japan. The findings, published today in the journal Translational Psychiatry, suggest that abnormal neural differentiation may contribute to the disease, such that fewer neurons and more non-neuronal cells are generated during the earliest stages of brain development. Schizophrenia is a debilitating mental illness that affects about 1 in 100 people. It is known to be highly heritable, but is genetically complex: so far, researchers have identified over 100 rare genetic variations and dozens of mutations associated with increased risk of developing the disease. One of the best characterised mutations associated with the disease is a microdeletion on chromosome 22, within a region containing dozens of genes known to be involved in the development, maturation, and function of brain circuits. This deletion is found in 1 in every 2,000 – 4,000 live births; all patients carrying it exhibit various psychiatric symptoms and conditions, with just under a third of them developing schizophrenia in adolescence or early adulthood. Manabu Toyoshima of the RIKEN Brain Science Institute and his colleagues obtained skin cells from two female schizophrenic patients diagnosed with the chromosome 22 deletion and two healthy individuals, then reprogrammed them to generate induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), unspecialised cells which, like embryonic stem cells, retain the ability to differentiate into all the different cell types in the body. They then compared the properties of iPSCs obtained from the schizophrenic patients with those from the healthy controls. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 22822 - Posted: 11.02.2016

Hannah Devlin The human brain is predisposed to learn negative stereotypes, according to research that offers clues as to how prejudice emerges and spreads through society. The study found that the brain responds more strongly to information about groups who are portrayed unfavourably, adding weight to the view that the negative depiction of ethnic or religious minorities in the media can fuel racial bias. Hugo Spiers, a neuroscientist at University College London, who led the research, said: “The newspapers are filled with ghastly things people do ... You’re getting all these news stories and the negative ones stand out. When you look at Islam, for example, there’s so many more negative stories than positive ones and that will build up over time.” The scientists also uncovered a characteristic brain signature seen when participants were told a member of a “bad” group had done something positive - an observation that is likely to tally with the subjective experience of minorities. “Whenever someone from a really bad group did something nice they were like, ‘Oh, weird,’” said Spiers. Previous studies have identified brain areas involved in gender or racial stereotyping, but this is the first attempt to investigate how the brain learns to link undesirable traits to specific groups and how this is converted into prejudice over time. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 22821 - Posted: 11.02.2016

By Virginia Morell Human hunters may be making birds smarter by inadvertently shooting those with smaller brains. That’s the conclusion of a new study, which finds that hunting may be exerting a powerful evolutionary force on bird populations in Denmark, and likely wherever birds are hunted. But the work also raises a red flag for some researchers who question whether the evolution of brain size can ever be tied to a single factor. The new work “broadens an emerging view that smarts really do matter in the natural, and increasingly human-dominated, world,” says John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist and expert on crow cognition at the University of Washington in Seattle who was not involved with the work. Hunting and fishing are known to affect many animal populations. For instance, the pike-perch in the Finnish Archipelago Sea has become smaller over time thanks to fishing, which typically removes the largest individuals from a population. This pressure also causes fish to reach sexual maturity earlier. On land, natural predators like arctic foxes and polar bears can also drive their prey species to become smarter because predators are most likely to catch those with smaller brains. For instance, a recent study showed that common eiders (maritime ducks) that raise the most chicks also have the largest heads and are better at forming protective neighborhood alliances than ducks with smaller heads—and presumably, brains. © 2016 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 22820 - Posted: 11.02.2016

By Brian Owens Cooperation makes it happen. Sailfish that work together in groups to hunt sardines can catch more fish than if they hunt alone, even without a real coordinated strategy. To catch their sardine dinner, a group of sailfish circle a school of sardines – known as a baitball – and break off a small section, driving it to the surface. They then take turns attacking these sardines, slashing at them with their long sword-like bills, which account for a quarter of their total length of up to 3.5 metres. Knocking their prey off-balance makes them easier to grab. These attacks only result in a catch about 25 per cent of the time, but they almost always injure several sardines. As the number of injured fish increases, it becomes ever easier for everyone to snag a meal. “There’s no coordination, no strict turn-taking or specific hunting roles, it’s opportunistic,” says James Herbert-Read, from Uppsala University in Sweden. But Herbert-Reads computer models now show that even this rudimentary form of cooperation is better than going it alone. Sailfish that work in groups capture more sardines than a lone fish would get in the same amount of time. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Aggression; Evolution
Link ID: 22819 - Posted: 11.02.2016

Laura Sanders The eyes may reveal whether the brain’s internal stopwatch runs fast or slow. Pupil size predicted whether a monkey would over- or underestimate a second, scientists report in the Nov. 2 Journal of Neuroscience. Scientists knew that pupils get bigger when a person is paying attention. They also knew that paying attention can influence how people perceive the passage of time. Using monkeys, the new study links pupil size and timing directly. “What they’ve done here is connect those dots,” says neuroscientist Thalia Wheatley of Dartmouth College. More generally, the study shows how the eyes are windows into how the brain operates. “There’s so much information coming out of the eyes,” Wheatley says. Neuroscientist Masaki Tanaka of Hokkaido University School of Medicine in Japan and colleagues trained three Japanese macaques to look at a spot on a computer screen after precisely one second had elapsed. The study measured the monkeys’ subjective timing abilities: The monkeys had to rely on themselves to count the milliseconds. Just before each trial, the researchers measured pupil diameters. When the monkeys underestimated a second by looking too soon, their pupil sizes were slightly larger than in trials in which the monkeys overestimated a second, the researchers found. That means that when pupils were large, the monkeys felt time zoom by. But when pupils were small, time felt slower. |© Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 22818 - Posted: 11.02.2016

Nicola Davis The proficiency of elite football referees could be down to their eagle eyes, say researchers. A study of elite and sub-elite referees has found that a greater tendency to predict and watch contact zones between players contributes to the greater accuracy of top-level referees. “Over the years they develop so much experience that they now can anticipate, very well, future events so that they can already direct their attention to those pieces of information where they expect something to happen,” said lead author Werner Helsen from the University of Leuven. Keith Hackett, a former football referee and former general manager of the Professional Game Match Officials Limited, said the research chimed with his own experiences. “In working with elite referees for a number of years I have recognised their ability to see, recognise think and then act in a seamless manner,” he said. “They develop skill sets that enable them to see and this means good game-reading and cognitive skills to be in the right place at the right time.” Mistakes, he believes, often come down to poor visual perception. “Last week, we saw an elite referee fail to detect the violent act of [Moussa] Sissoko using his arm/elbow, putting his opponent’s safety at risk,” he said. “The review panel, having received confirmation from the referee that he failed to see the incident despite looking in the direction of the foul challenge, were able to act.” Writing in the journal Cognitive Research, researchers from the University of Leuven in Belgium and Brunel University in west London say they recruited 39 referees, 20 of whom were elite referees and 19 were experienced but had never refereed at a professional level. © 2016 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 22817 - Posted: 11.01.2016

Bruce Bower Many preschoolers take a surprisingly long and bumpy mental path to the realization that people can have mistaken beliefs — say, thinking that a ball is in a basket when it has secretly been moved to a toy box. Traditional learning curves, in which kids gradually move from knowing nothing to complete understanding, don’t apply to this landmark social achievement and probably to many other types of learning, a new study concludes. Kids ranging in age from 3 to 5 often go back and forth between passing and failing false-belief tests for several months to more than one year, say psychologist Sara Baker of the University of Cambridge and her colleagues. A small minority of youngsters jump quickly from always failing to always passing these tests, the scientists report October 20 in Cognitive Psychology. “If these results are replicated, it will surprise a lot of researchers that there is such a low level of sudden insight into false beliefs,” says psychologist Malinda Carpenter, currently at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Early childhood researchers generally assume that preschoolers either pass or fail false-belief tests, with a brief transition between the two, explains Carpenter, who did not participate in the new study. Grasping that others sometimes have mistaken beliefs is a key step in social thinking. False-belief understanding may start out as something that can be indicated nonverbally but not described. Human 2-year-olds and even chimpanzees tend to look toward spots where a person would expect to find a hidden item that only the children or apes have seen moved elsewhere (SN Online: 10/6/16). © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2016

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22816 - Posted: 11.01.2016

By GINA KOLATA Americans believe that obesity is the biggest health threat in the nation today — bigger even than cancer. But though scientific research shows that diet and exercise are insufficient solutions, a large majority say fat people should be able to summon the willpower to lose weight on their own. The findings are from a nationally representative survey of 1,509 adults released on Tuesday by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, an independent research institution. The study, funded by the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery, found that concerns about obesity have risen. Just a few years ago, in a more limited survey, cancer was seen as the most serious health threat. The lead researcher, Jennifer Benz of the survey group at the University of Chicago, said that to her knowledge no other survey has provided so comprehensive a view of Americans’ beliefs about obesity, including how to treat it, whether people are personally responsible for it and whether it is a disease. Researchers say obesity, which affects one-third of Americans, is caused by interactions between the environment and genetics and has little to do with sloth or gluttony. There are hundreds of genes that can predispose to obesity in an environment where food is cheap and portions are abundant. Yet three-quarters of survey participants said obesity resulted from a lack of willpower. The best treatment, they said, is to take responsibility for yourself, go on a diet and exercise. Obesity specialists said the survey painted an alarming picture. They said the findings went against evidence about the science behind the disease, and showed that outdated notions about obesity persisted, to the detriment of those affected. © 2016 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 22815 - Posted: 11.01.2016

By Julie Hecht Come across an image like this, and you’d be a weirdo not to investigate. Meet infrared thermography, a non-invasive way to visualize changes to body surface temperature. Thermographic video cameras not only produce images that would make Andy Warhol proud (or at least sue for infringement), but the tool allows researchers to assess physiological changes—and potentially emotional states—in a wide variety of species like distantly related BFFs Canis familiaris and Homo sapiens. Think about it—physiological changes are part of the emotional response. When you are frightened, blood rushes away from your extremities to get your muscles ready to go, which means your extremities get cooler as your core gets warmer. Infrared thermography, which captures changes to body surface temperature, is going to pick this up. The tip of a scared person’s nose gets cooler (more blue) under an infrared camera, and studies find that when scared or distressed, rat paws and tails appear cooler, as do the outer parts of sheep and rabbit ears. Dog ears recently caught the attention of Stefanie Riemer and colleagues at the Animal Behavior, Cognition and Welfare Research Group (Twitter) at the University of Lincoln, UK. They wanted to know whether dog ears would show differential blood-flow patterns in response to something good as well as something less good. Dogs participated in a separation test where they were briefly alone in a novel environment (which elicits short-term distress) and then reunited with people (typically a positive experience). The separation, the researchers assumed, would be associated with negative emotions and therefore cooling of the ears, while being reunited with people (excellent!) would show an increase in ear temperature. The study appears in the current issue of Physiology & Behavior. © 2016 Scientific American

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 22814 - Posted: 11.01.2016

By Jesse Singal For a long time, the United States’ justice system has been notorious for its proclivity for imprisoning children. Because of laws that grant prosecutors and judges discretion to bump juveniles up to the category of “adult” when they commit crimes deemed serious enough by the authorities, the U.S. is an outlier in locking up kids, with some youthful defendants even getting life sentences. Naturally, this has attracted a great deal of outrage and advocacy from human-rights organizations, who argue that kids, by virtue of not lacking certain judgment, foresight, and decision-making abilities, should be treated a bit more leniently. Writing for the Marshall Project and drawing on some interesting brain science, Dana Goldstein takes the argument about youth incarceration even further: We should also rethink our treatment of offenders who are young adults. As Goldstein explains, the more researchers study the brain, the more they realize that it takes decades for the organ to develop fully and to impart to its owners their full, adult capacities for reasoning. “Altogether,” she writes, “the research suggests that brain maturation continues into one’s twenties and even thirties.” Many of these insights come from the newest generation of neuroscience research. “Everyone has always known that there are behavioral changes throughout the lifespan,” Catherine Lebel, an assistant professor of radiology at the University of Calgary who has conducted research into brain development, told Goldstein. “It’s only with new imaging techniques over the last 15 years that we’ve been able to get at some of these more subtle changes.” ! © 2016, New York Media LLC.

Keyword: Attention; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 22813 - Posted: 11.01.2016