by Barbara Bradley Hagerty Kent Kiehl has studied hundreds of psychopaths. Kiehl is one of the world's leading investigators of psychopathy and a professor at the University of New Mexico. He says he can often see it in their eyes: There's an intensity in their stare, as if they're trying to pick up signals on how to respond. But the eyes are not an element of psychopathy, just a clue. Officially, Kiehl scores their pathology on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist, which measures traits such as the inability to feel empathy or remorse, pathological lying, or impulsivity. "The scores range from zero to 40," Kiehl explains in his sunny office overlooking a golf course. "The average person in the community, a male, will score about 4 or 5. Your average inmate will score about 22. An individual with psychopathy is typically described as 30 or above. Brian scored 38.5 basically. He was in the 99th percentile." "Brian" is Brian Dugan, a man who is serving two life sentences for rape and murder in Chicago. Last July, Dugan pleaded guilty to raping and murdering 10-year-old Jeanine Nicarico in 1983, and he was put on trial to determine whether he should be executed. Kiehl was hired by the defense to do a psychiatric evaluation. On screen, Dugan is dressed in an orange jumpsuit. He seems calm, even normal — until he lifts his hands to take a sip of water and you see the handcuffs. Dugan is smart — his IQ is over 140 — but he admits he has always had shallow emotions. He tells Kiehl that in his quarter century in prison, he believes he's developed a sense of remorse. Copyright 2010 NPR

Keyword: Aggression; Emotions
Link ID: 14227 - Posted: 07.03.2010

By Christine Soares A restful night’s sleep might make a cup of coffee less of a desperate need first thing in the morning. But pharmaceutical companies are looking into whether the latest pills to promise sound, natural sleep could also play an active role in overcoming even the most powerful addictions. The new sleep aids block the activity of brain peptides called orexins. These tiny proteins keep us wide awake and attentive during the day, and they also govern some stimulating effects of addictive drugs. Orexins do not cause addiction or relapse directly, but neither happens without the peptides’ participation. The intriguing connection between sleep and addiction has long been observed in people who suffer from narcolepsy—a disorder that causes sudden-onset sleep. Although narcoleptics were sometimes treated with potent amphetamines to help them stay awake, they never became addicted to the drugs. By 1998 genetic detective work had traced the cause of narcolepsy to mutations in the genes for orexins or their receptors—discoveries that revealed both the peptides’ existence and their critical role in keeping the brain awake. Efforts to turn those insights into novel insomnia treatments have led to several compounds that are now in late-stage clinical trials. The same companies developing these sleep aids are also investigat-ing orexins’ role in addiction through research in animals. In a recent study Davide Quarta and his co-workers at Glaxo­SmithKline Medicines Research Center in Verona, Italy, confirmed that when the company’s experimental orexin blocker SB-334867 was admin­istered to rats along with amphetamine their brains released less dopamine and they became less sensitized to the stimulant than controls did, even with repeated doses. Sensitized neurons grow extra receptors for the craved drug, demanding more of it to achieve stimulation, thereby fueling a cycle that leads to addiction. © 2010 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Sleep
Link ID: 14226 - Posted: 07.03.2010

By Bruce Bower Botox treatment to erase unsightly frown lines may cause unforeseen emotional wrinkles. First-time Botox patients become slower at evaluating descriptions of negative emotions, possibly putting the patients at a social disadvantage, a new study indicates. For more than a century, scientists have posited that facial expressions trigger and intensify relevant feelings, rather than simply advertise what an individual already feels. Botox patients provide a novel line of support for this idea, as well as for the notion that facial expressions activate links between brain regions responsible for emotions and language, says psychology graduate student David Havas of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Botox is short for botulinum toxin-A, a neurotoxic protein that causes temporary muscle paralysis beginning one to three days after an injection and lasting for three to four months. Two weeks after their first Botox injections, 40 women took an average of about one-third of a second longer to read sentences describing angry and sad situations than they did immediately before the procedure, Havas and his colleagues found. Critically, Botox patients show no decline in the speed with which they read sentences about happy situations, Havas’ team reports in an upcoming Psychological Science. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 14225 - Posted: 07.03.2010

by Bob Holmes Which face is more attractive? If you chose the face on the left, you share the tastes of most heterosexual men. It is a composite face, or "morph", made from the faces of eight women with unusually small feet. The face on the right is a morph of eight women with unusually large feet. It's quite a difference, isn't it? Women with smaller feet have prettier faces, at least according to the men who took part in this study. So do women with longer thigh bones and narrower hips, as well as women who are taller overall. And the contest isn't even a close one. "These are the most strikingly different morphs I've ever seen," says Jeremy Atkinson, an evolutionary psychologist at the University at Albany, New York. Atkinson and his colleague Michelle Rowe measured hand length, foot length, thigh length and hip width on 60 white female college students, then adjusted each measurement to account for individual differences in overall height. For each of 16 body-part measurements, they selected the eight women with the shortest lengths and the eight with the longest, and constructed morphs of their faces. These morphs were then rated for attractiveness by 77 heterosexual male students. The men were three-and-a-half times as likely to pick the short-footed morph as more attractive, and almost 10 times as likely to say it was more feminine, Atkinson and Rowe found. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14224 - Posted: 07.03.2010

by Laurie Rich, Jane Bosveld, Andrew Grant, Amy Barth The brain is a castle on a hill. Encased in bone and protected by a special layer of cells, it is shielded from infections and injuries—but also from many pharmaceuticals and even from the body’s own immune defenses. As a result, brain problems are tough to diagnose and to treat. To meet this challenge, researchers are exploring unconventional therapies, from electrodes to laser-light stimulation to mind-bending drugs. Some of these radical experiments may never pan out. But, as frequently happens in medicine, a few of today’s improbable approaches may evolve into tomorrow’s miraculous cures. 1. Man Meets Machine In a sense, cyborgs already walk among us: Nearly 200,000 deaf or near-deaf people have cochlear implants, electronic sound-processing machines that stimulate the auditory nerve and link into the brain. But even by the fanciful science fiction definition, the age of cyborgs is just around the corner. In the last decade, researchers have become increasingly skilled at detecting and interpreting brain signals. Technologies that allow people to use their thoughts to control machines—computers, speaking devices, or prosthetic limbs—are already being tested and could soon be available for widespread applications.

Keyword: Robotics; Hearing
Link ID: 14223 - Posted: 07.03.2010

Martin Enserink It was just a snippet of news, reported by an obscure journal in the Netherlands. And yet it lit up the Internet. Twitter was all atwitter, scientists' mailboxes on both sides of the Atlantic began filling up, and dozens of bloggers started jubilating. "It's happened. I cannot tell you all how this changes the world as we have known it for 25+ years," one patient wrote on her blog. "Now to work on the vindication part!" The reason for all the excitement? Scientists at the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were reported to have confirmed the link, first published in Science last year, between a human retrovirus and the elusive condition called chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Earlier this year, three other groups reported being unable to replicate such a connection. That federal scientists now confirmed it was a huge mood-lifter for patients, many of whom are desperate to find a biological cause, and a cure, for their debilitating ailment. But the story wasn't as simple as that. Science has learned that a paper describing the new findings, already accepted by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), has been put on hold because it directly contradicts another as-yet-unpublished study by a third government agency, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That paper, a retrovirus scientist says, has been submitted to Retrovirology and is also on hold; it fails to find a link between the xenotropic murine leukemia virus-related virus (XMRV) and CFS. The contradiction has caused "nervousness" both at PNAS and among senior officials within the Department of Health and Human Services, of which all three agencies are part, says one scientist with inside knowledge. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 14222 - Posted: 07.03.2010

Greg Miller Michael Meaney and Moshe Szyf work in the same Canadian city, but it took a chance meeting at a Spanish pub more than 15 years ago to jump-start a collaboration that helped create a new discipline. Meaney, a neuroscientist at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal, studies how early life experiences shape behavior later in life. Across town at McGill University, Szyf is a leading expert on chemical alterations to DNA that affect gene activity. Sometime in the mid-1990s, both men attended the same meeting in Madrid and ended up at a bar talking and drinking beer. "A lot of it," Szyf recalls. Meaney told Szyf about his findings that rat pups raised by inattentive mothers tend to be more anxious as adults than pups raised by more nurturing mothers. He also described how the activity of stress-related genes was altered in the undernurtured pups. At some point in the conversation, Szyf had a flash of insight: This difference must be due to DNA methylation—the chemical alteration he had been studying in stem cells and tumor cells. The idea cut against the conventional thinking in both fields. In neuroscience, the prevailing wisdom held that long-term changes in behavior result from physical changes in neural circuits—such as when neurons build new synapses and become more sensitive to messages from their neighbors. And most scientists who studied DNA methylation thought the process was restricted to embryonic development or cancer cells. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science. All Rights Reserved.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Stress
Link ID: 14221 - Posted: 07.03.2010

Beds that cost up to $60,000 each are now available, note Dr. Michael Thorpy and Shelby Freedman Harris of the Sleep-Wake Disorders Center at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. But is a better mattress the secret to curing insomnia? Drs. Thorpy and Harris recently responded to questions about insomnia on the Consults blog. Here, they address which type of mattress is best for a sound night’s sleep and whether light or noise might be reasons for sleeping poorly. Q. Is there any research that shows if the kind of mattress you have affects sleep? Dee, Western New York A. It is common for people with insomnia to wonder if their bed, or some other environmental factor like light or noise, is the reason for their sleeping poorly. Sometimes an uncomfortable mattress is the cause of the sleep disturbance, but most often it is not. Very few studies have analyzed how the type of mattress affects sleep quality, and they’ve generally involved a small number of healthy subjects or patients who are in pain. The results have been variable, with some preferring a soft surface and others preferring a hard surface. No clear benefit of any mattress type has been shown. People in some jungle cultures, or even hikers or campers, who sleep on mats on the hard ground can usually get a good night’s sleep if they do it often enough. It is largely a matter of conditioning to the environment that allows a person to sleep comfortably. Problems can arise, however, with sudden changes, like staying in a hotel overnight, when a new bed or environment can be a factor in disrupting sleep. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 14220 - Posted: 07.01.2010

Exercise has previously been linked to possible benefits in staving off dementia, but a new look at the topic suggests the earlier the better. The prevalence of cognitive impairment was significantly lower in women aged 65 and older who reported they were physically active as teens than in those who were inactive in their teen years, the study found. "If we want to optimally prevent dementia, it's important to start physical activity as early in life as possible," said principal investigator Laura Middleton of the Heart and Stroke Foundation Centre for Stroke Recovery at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. "More and more people are starting to recognize physical activity as one of the most promising means to prevent cognitive impairment and dementia. And what this study adds is that it's not only important in mid and late life — that we really have to start as early as possible." The study was published Wednesday appears in the July issue of the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society. Middleton worked on the project while she was at the University of California in San Francisco, and used data from the Study of Osteoporotic Fractures. She analyzed the responses of 9,704 women in four U.S. cities: Baltimore, Minneapolis, Portland, Ore., and Monongahela Valley, Pa. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 14219 - Posted: 07.01.2010

Scientists at Penn State University say they have developed a mouse that gets depressed in a similar fashion to humans, which could led to better treatment for the condition among people. Biology professor Bernhard Luscher, the project's leader, said that is because scientists will be able to test different drugs for various mental conditions and observe the mice to see the results. "A mouse can't tell us if it is feeling depressed, so we used a number of different kinds of tests to gauge ... changes ... of a type of depression that, in humans, does not respond well to some antidepressant drugs," Luscher said. Drug trials Researchers essentially created a rodent with a genetic defect that interferes with the development of a protein in the brain, called the GABA-A receptor. The lack of that protein allows the mice to mimic brain disorders among humans but lets the researchers reach different conclusions, the scientists noted. For example, a GABA-A deficiency had been linked to anxiety disorders but not directly to depression. In a paper to be published in Biology Psychiatry, however, Luscher used the genetically-modified mouse to show that the protein is in fact important to proper brain function and that whatever cerebral problems cause anxiety also have a hand in the appearance of depression. © CBC 2010

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 14218 - Posted: 07.01.2010

by Debora MacKenzie INFECTIOUS disease is taking an unexpected toll by sapping people's brainpower in the world's poorest countries. So say Christopher Eppig and colleagues at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, who found that a country's disease burden is strongly linked to the average IQ of its population. Building and maintaining the brain requires 87 per cent of all the body's energy in newborns and 44 per cent in 5-year-old children. Fighting infection also takes enormous amounts of energy, so children may struggle to do both at the same time. Eppig reasoned that an increased risk of catching an infectious disease during critical developmental stages may affect subsequent IQ levels. His team matched three sets of IQ estimates of healthy people in 192 countries, against the World Health Organization's estimate of the burden of 28 infectious diseases in those countries. With only a few exceptions, they found very high correlations: the more disease, the lower the IQ. Disease was more closely related to IQ than any other variable they tested. IQ differences are known to correlate with GDP, and educational and nutritional levels, but when variation in IQ due to disease was accounted for, IQ showed no correlation with these other factors (Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.0973). This may explain the effect discovered by the political philosopher James Flynn, who noted that IQ soars following economic development. "Others have suggested that it is caused by better education, but we found that infectious disease is a much better predictor," Eppig says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Intelligence
Link ID: 14217 - Posted: 07.01.2010

By Susan Milius PORTLAND, Ore. — A tendency for daughters to fall for guys that are like their dads helps keep two species of fish from interbreeding. Two distinct species of the threespine stickleback dart about in several lakes of British Columbia, where the two fishes could easily mate with each other. But they don’t; the slimmer ones, which feed on plankton in open water, mate with their own kind, while the larger, bottom-feeding ones mate with theirs. Experiments now show that early in life, females of both kinds pick up some cue from their fathers, probably his odor, that provides a guide later on when it comes time to choose a mate, according to Genevieve Kozak of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The experiments suggest that this process, known as imprinting, may help the stickleback species stay separate even though they live in the same lakes, Kozak said June 27 at the Evolution 2010 meeting. “One of the coolest talks I've seen,” said evolutionary biologist Daphne Fairbairn of the University of California, Riverside. Just how new species form and stay separate while sharing space remains a lively topic in biology, and for some creatures, such as the extraordinarily diverse cichlid fish in African lakes, biologists are still looking for a good explanation. “I think the cichlid people are going to jump on this,” Fairbairn said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 14216 - Posted: 06.29.2010

Even if you haven't taken the invisible gorilla test, you've probably heard of it. It consists of a short video of two teams of students moving around while they pass basketballs. The idea is to count the number of passes made by one team while ignoring those made by the other. Roughly half of those who take the test fail to notice a person dressed as a gorilla who strolls into the middle of the players and beats its chest at the camera. The viewers are concentrating so hard on counting the passes that they're blind to the unexpected, even though it is staring them in the face. This book is by the psychologists who devised that experiment (see Gorilla psychologists: Weird stuff in plain sight). Their aim is to show how easy it is to miss things that are right in front of us when we're not looking out for them, and how illusions and distorted beliefs lead us astray every day. They cover what they consider to be six of the most common intuitive errors: Some of these biases have been widely written about, but it is worth reading them again here for the clarity with which Chris Chabris and Dan Simons explain them and their talent for making them relevant to everyday situations. They demonstrate, for example, how over-confidence in one's abilities can be hilarious in a talent show contestant or an incompetent criminal caught on camera, but worrying when it dissuades other members of a group from sharing their own - less confidently held but nonetheless important - opinions. And such over-confidence can be positively dangerous in a witness whose apparently credible evidence is given undue weight by jurors or police. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14215 - Posted: 06.29.2010

by Eliza Strickland When the housing market crashed in late 2008, most people were surprised by the sudden collapse. John Coates was not among them. He had spent 12 years trading derivatives for New York’s biggest banks—and had left finance for neuroscience, studying what happens in the brains of traders who put billions of dollars on the line in risky financial decisions. Coates, who now studies neuroscience and behavioral economics at the University of Cambridge, has made the London stock market his laboratory. His experiments seem to show that a trader’s success may be determined not by his wits but by the hormones that course through his brain. Hormone-fueled decision making can have powerful effects, intensifying market booms and busts and destabilizing the economy, Coates suggests. The markets’ operations are determined by legions of young men governed by confidence-boosting testosterone and the stress-related hormone cortisol. When hormones spiral out of control, economic behavior can do so as well. How did you get inside the heads of the people working in the financial markets? In our first experiment, we were on a trading floor in London with 250 traders, of which only three were women; the average age was maybe 28. They traded in and out very quickly, which means they would hold positions for minutes or even seconds. They would spot a price anomaly and jump on it, then quickly unwind. And they would make trades of huge value —$1 billion or $2 billion at a crack. We wanted to find out what was going on in the brains and bodies of these men who were taking such huge risks. So we collected saliva samples from the traders to measure their levels of testosterone and cortisol in the morning and the afternoon, bracketing the bulk of the day’s trading. Our hypothesis was that when traders had above-average testosterone their profits would go up, and in fact that’s exactly what we saw. It turned out that their morning testosterone levels were actually predicting their afternoon profits.

Keyword: Emotions; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 14214 - Posted: 06.29.2010

By Carolyn Butler No matter what I do, and despite the fact that my baby has arisen at the crack of dawn for well over a year now, I just can't seem to turn myself into a morning person. My body simply refuses to shut down much before midnight, and so I work, pay bills and watch terrible reality-TV reruns until the wee hours, only to be dog-tired and disagreeable come 6 a.m., when my live little alarm clock begins wailing for me. Even when I force myself to go to bed on the early side or when my husband lets me sleep in on a Saturday, waking up always seems a chore. My brother-in-law, on the other hand, is known for unabashedly yawning in people's faces starting right around 8:30 at night, whether he's at home, a family dinner or the theater. I ran into him bright and early the other morning on my way to Starbucks, when I was so beat that I could barely communicate -- and he was clear-eyed and chipper, heading off on a long run. What makes one person greet the day with smiles and energy, and another hide under the covers until the last possible moment? It's a combination of genetics, the environment and our lifestyle choices, says sleep specialist Mark Wu, an assistant professor in neurology at Johns Hopkins Medicine. He explains that your body's natural circadian rhythms, which cycle up and down over an average 24.1 hours, control sleep and wakefulness and differ from person to person. How much sleep you've had lately also makes a difference, influencing how great your body's drive for more shut-eye is. © 2010 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Sleep; Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 14213 - Posted: 06.29.2010

By DENISE GRADY For her first appointment with Dr. Daniel Simon, Neelima Raval showed up with a rolling file cabinet full of documents. She had downloaded every word written by or about Dr. Paolo Zamboni, a vascular surgeon from Italy with a most unorthodox theory about multiple sclerosis. Dr. Zamboni believes that the disease, which damages the nervous system, may be caused by narrowed veins in the neck and chest that block the drainage of blood from the brain. He has reported in medical journals that opening those veins with the kind of balloons used to treat blocked heart arteries—an experimental treatment he calls the “liberation procedure”— can relieve symptoms. The idea is a radical departure from the conventional belief that multiple sclerosis is caused by a malfunctioning immune system and inflammation. The new theory has taken off on the Internet, inspiring hope among patients, interest from some researchers and scorn from others. Supporters consider it an outside-the-box idea that could transform the treatment of the disease. Critics call it an outlandish notion that will probably waste time and money, and may harm patients. These critics warn that multiple sclerosis has unpredictable attacks and remissions that make it devilishly hard to know whether treatments are working — leaving patients vulnerable to purported “cures” that do not work. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 14212 - Posted: 06.29.2010

By JOHN TIERNEY At long last, the doodling daydreamer is getting some respect. In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions. But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems. Consider, for instance, these three words: eye, gown, basket. Can you think of another word that relates to all three? If not, don’t worry for now. By the time we get back to discussing the scientific significance of this puzzle, the answer might occur to you through the “incubation effect” as your mind wanders from the text of this article — and, yes, your mind is probably going to wander, no matter how brilliant the rest of this column is. Mind wandering, as psychologists define it, is a subcategory of daydreaming, which is the broad term for all stray thoughts and fantasies, including those moments you deliberately set aside to imagine yourself winning the lottery or accepting the Nobel. But when you’re trying to accomplish one thing and lapse into “task-unrelated thoughts,” that’s mind wandering. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 14211 - Posted: 06.29.2010

By NATALIE ANGIER WHEN the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission ended on Friday with the 24-year ban on commercial whaling still intact, however tenuous its hold and leviathan its loopholes, sighs of relief issued from many quarters — along with, no doubt, a volley of whistles, clicks and proudly parochial squeals. After two years of transcontinental haggling, the commission had been expected to replace today’s hunting ban with limited hunting quotas. Supporters of the policy change had argued that by specifying how many whales of a given species could be sustainably harvested over a 10-year period, and by tightening or eliminating current loopholes through which whaling nations like Japan and Norway kill the marine mammals for “scientific” purposes, the new measure would effectively reduce the number of whales slaughtered each year. Yet many biologists who study whales and dolphins view such a compromise as deeply flawed, and instead urge that negotiators redouble efforts to abolish commercial whaling and dolphin hunting entirely. As these scientists see it, the evidence is high and mounting that the cetacean order includes species second only to humans in mental, social and behavioral complexity, and that maybe we shouldn’t talk about what we’re harvesting or harpooning, but whom. “At the very least, you could put it in line with hunting chimps,” said Hal Whitehead, who studies sperm whales at Dalhousie University in Halifax. “When you compare relative brain size, or levels of self-awareness, sociality, the importance of culture, cetaceans come out on most of these measures in the gap between chimps and humans. They fit the philosophical definition of personhood.” Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 14210 - Posted: 06.28.2010

By Elizabeth Cooney Adam Davis says one of his brightest friends makes the most ridiculous mistakes. For all his smarts, he’ll cross the street without looking. “I know some people who are heavy drinkers, and they’ve actually told me they feel their memory is going. They drink and then they black out, more and more,’’ said Davis, a 20-year-old Lexington High graduate who attends Occidental College in Los Angeles. “They don’t change their behavior. I don’t think it’s addiction. I guess that gets into judgment.’’ Smart kids doing stupid things: It’s the teen brain paradox. Extraordinarily quick to learn and rapidly reaching fluency in abstract thought, teens still make bonehead decisions, perhaps more so when routines relax in summer. But that’s because they’re operating with brains that are still a work in progress. Of all the organs in our bodies, the brain takes the longest to develop. Frontal lobes — the seat of judgment — are the last pieces to be fully connected to the parts of the brain that sense danger or solve calculus problems. A growing body of neuroscientific evidence places full brain maturity at about age 25, well past the point when young people begin to drive, drink, vote, or go off to war. “We all know what the frontal lobe does,’’ said Dr. Frances Jensen, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and Children’s Hospital Boston. “It’s insight, judgment, inhibition, self-awareness, cause and effect, acknowledgment of cause and effect. And big surprise: It’s not done in your teen years. Hence [teens’] impulsiveness, their unpredictable behavior, their lack of ability to acknowledge and see cause and effect, despite the fact they are getting 800s on their SATs and can be cognitively highly functional and memorize at a much more impressive rate than we as adults do later.’’ © 2010 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 14209 - Posted: 06.28.2010

By Bruce Bower Don’t be shocked if car sellers soon decide to seat prospective buyers in beanbag chairs, or maybe in La-Z-Boys. Soft seats subtly steer people away from driving hard bargains, a provocative new study suggests. Objects’ tactile qualities, such as a chair’s softness or hardness, automatically call to mind associated metaphors, such as flexibility or rigidity, say MIT psychologist Joshua Ackerman and his colleagues. In this way, sensations of weight, texture and hardness surreptitiously create mindsets that influence how people think about and deal with others, the researchers propose in the June 25 Science. The team conducted six experiments in which people, some passersby on streets and some volunteers in a lab, experienced different touch sensations while making several kinds of decisions. In one case, 43 people sitting in hard wooden chairs showed less willingness to compromise in price negotiations for a new car than 43 people who sat in cushioned chairs. After being told that their initial offer on a car with a $16,500 sticker price had been refused, wooden-chair sitters upped their offers by an average of $897, compared with $1,244 for the cushioned crowd. In other words, people in soft chairs increased their offers 38% more than people in hard chairs. “I suspect that the stresses of real-world decision-making environments will act as mental distracters, making people even more susceptible to the effects of tactile cues,” Ackerman says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2010

Keyword: Emotions; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 14208 - Posted: 06.26.2010