By ROBERT J. ZATORRE and VALORIE N. SALIMPOOR MUSIC is not tangible. You can’t eat it, drink it or mate with it. It doesn’t protect against the rain, wind or cold. It doesn’t vanquish predators or mend broken bones. And yet humans have always prized music — or well beyond prized, loved it. In the modern age we spend great sums of money to attend concerts, download music files, play instruments and listen to our favorite artists whether we’re in a subway or salon. But even in Paleolithic times, people invested significant time and effort to create music, as the discovery of flutes carved from animal bones would suggest. So why does this thingless “thing” — at its core, a mere sequence of sounds — hold such potentially enormous intrinsic value? The quick and easy explanation is that music brings a unique pleasure to humans. Of course, that still leaves the question of why. But for that, neuroscience is starting to provide some answers. More than a decade ago, our research team used brain imaging to show that music that people described as highly emotional engaged the reward system deep in their brains — activating subcortical nuclei known to be important in reward, motivation and emotion. Subsequently we found that listening to what might be called “peak emotional moments” in music — that moment when you feel a “chill” of pleasure to a musical passage — causes the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, an essential signaling molecule in the brain. When pleasurable music is heard, dopamine is released in the striatum — an ancient part of the brain found in other vertebrates as well — which is known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex and which is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamine. © 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hearing
Link ID: 18251 - Posted: 06.10.2013

By Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld By now you’ve seen the pretty pictures: Color-drenched brain scans capturing Buddhist monks meditating, addicts craving cocaine, and college sophomores choosing Coke over Pepsi. The media—and even some neuroscientists, it seems—love to invoke the neural foundations of human behavior to explain everything from the Bernie Madoff financial fiasco to slavish devotion to our iPhones, the sexual indiscretions of politicians, conservatives’ dismissal of global warming, and even an obsession with self-tanning. Brains are big on campus, too. Take a map of any major university, and you can trace the march of neuroscience from research labs and medical centers into schools of law and business and departments of economics and philosophy. In recent years, neuroscience has merged with a host of other disciplines, spawning such new areas of study as neurolaw, neuroeconomics, neurophilosophy, neuromarketing, and neurofinance. Add to this the birth of neuroaesthetics, neurohistory, neuroliterature, neuromusicology, neuropolitics, and neurotheology. The brain has even wandered into such unlikely redoubts as English departments, where professors debate whether scanning subjects’ brains as they read passages from Jane Austen novels represents (a) a fertile inquiry into the power of literature or (b) a desperate attempt to inject novelty into a field that has exhausted its romance with psychoanalysis and postmodernism. Brains are in demand. Once the largely exclusive province of neuroscientists and neurologists, the brain has now entered the popular mainstream. As a newly minted cultural artifact, the brain is portrayed in paintings, sculptures, and tapestries and put on display in museums and galleries. © 2013 The Associated Press

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 18250 - Posted: 06.10.2013

by Emily Underwood The mushroom clouds produced by more than 500 nuclear bomb tests during the Cold War may have had a silver lining, after all. More than 50 years later, scientists have found a way to use radioactive carbon isotopes released into the atmosphere by nuclear testing to settle a long-standing debate in neuroscience: Does the adult human brain produce new neurons? After working to hone their technique for more than a decade, the researchers report that a small region of the human brain involved in memory makes new neurons throughout our lives—a continuous process of self-renewal that may aid learning. For a long time, scientific dogma held that our brains did not produce new neurons during adulthood, says Pasko Rakic, a neuroscientist at Yale University who was not involved in the study. In 1998, however, a group of Swedish researchers reported the first evidence that neurons are continually born throughout the human lifespan. The researchers injected a compound normally used to label tumor cell division into patients who had agreed to have their brains examined after death. When the scientists examined the postmortem brain tissue, they found that new neurons had indeed sprung forth during adulthood. The cells were located in a part of the hippocampus—a pair of seahorse-shaped structures located deep within the brain and involved in memory and learning. The compound was later found to be toxic, however, and the experiment was never repeated. Since 1998, a number of studies have demonstrated that new neurons are generated in the same small region of the hippocampus in mice and appear to play an important role in memory and learning, says Kirsty Spalding, a molecular biologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and lead author of the new study. Because the 1998 work was never confirmed by independent research, however, scientists have fiercely argued over whether the neuron birth seen in mice also occurs in people. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Neurogenesis; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 18249 - Posted: 06.08.2013

Kerri Smith Researchers have both created and relieved symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in genetically modified mice using a technique that turns brain cells on and off with light, known as optogenetics. The work, by two separate teams, confirms the neural circuits that contribute to the condition and points to treatment targets. It also provides insight into how quickly compulsive behaviours can develop — and how quickly they might be soothed. The results of the studies are published in Science1, 2. Brain scanning in humans with OCD has pointed to two areas — the orbitofrontal cortex, just behind the eyes, and the striatum, a hub in the middle of the brain — as being involved in the condition's characteristic repetitive and compulsive behaviours. But “in people we have no way of testing cause and effect”, says Susanne Ahmari, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York who led one of the studies. It is not clear, for example, whether abnormal brain activity causes the compulsions, or whether the behaviour simply results from the brain trying to hold symptoms at bay by compensating. “There’s been a big debate in the field,” says Satinder Kaur Singh of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who studies molecules involved in OCD-like disorders but was not involved in the new studies. “What the Ahmari paper shows is that it is causative.” © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 18248 - Posted: 06.08.2013

by Tia Ghose, LiveScience Ape and human infants at comparable stages of development use similar gestures, such as pointing or lifting their arms to be picked up, new research suggests. Chimpanzee, bonobo and human babies rely mainly on gestures at about a year old, and gradually develop symbolic language (words, for human babies; and signs, for apes) as they get older. The findings suggest that “gesture plays an important role in the evolution of language, because it preceded language use across the species," said study co-author Kristen Gillespie-Lynch, a developmental psychologist at the College of Staten Island in New York. The idea that language arose from gesture and a primitive sign language has a long history. French philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac proposed the idea in 1746, and other scientists have noted that walking on two legs, which frees up the hands for gesturing, occurred earlier in human evolution than changes to the vocal tract that enabled speaking. But although apes in captivity can learn some language by learning from humans, in the wild, they don't gesture nearly as much as human infants, making it difficult to tease out commonalities in language development that have biological versus environmental roots. © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 18247 - Posted: 06.08.2013

Helen Shen The case of the missing bird penis is a long-standing mystery in evolutionary biology. But the identification of a molecular mechanism that controls penis loss in birds goes some way to solving this conundrum. Roughly 97% of avian species sport little or nothing in the way of a phallus, despite reproducing by internal fertilization. A study published today in Current Biology1 shows that the development of chicken penises is cut short by signals that promote cell death. “This paper would be in Nature or Science if it were about people,” says Richard Prum, an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. “The whole result is entirely novel.” Male chickens, which possess only a rudimentary phallic nub, pump their sperm into females using a 'cloacal kiss' — a move that presses together the male and female cloacas, openings used for waste excretion and copulation. By contrast, ducks boast large and elaborately coiled penises that can measure about half the length of their bodies2. To better understand the signals that control penis growth, researchers led by Martin Cohn, a developmental biologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, looked for differences between developing duck and chicken embryos. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18246 - Posted: 06.08.2013

By Jason G. Goldman Within the wildlife conservation community, both in the field (“in situ“) as well as in captive settings (“ex situ“), there is a great deal of folk knowledge about the best methods for animal care as well as species protection and restoration. Increasingly, however, empirical knowledge from psychology and cognitive science can be brought to bear on husbandry, management, and conservation-related issues and can inform best practices. Here’s one small example. At the Los Angeles Zoo, I recently participated in a study with on the effects of environmental enrichment on meerkat behavior. Thoughtfully designed environmental enrichment programs, it is thought, allow captive animals to display a wider variety of naturalistic behaviors. A wealth of evidence suggests that when animals exhibit their natural behaviors, zoo visitors have a better and more educational experience, and animal welfare is increased. Unfortunately, one side effect of captivity is the possible emergence of non-naturalistic repetitive or stereotypic behaviors. Stereotypic behaviors vary according to the species, but might include swaying, coprophagy, regurgitation and reingestion, or pacing. When combined with stereotypic swimming patterns, pacing may actually be the most common form of stereotypy across species in modern zoos. While these behaviors may in fact be more stressful for zoo visitors than for the animals themselves, zoos still have a responsibility to minimize them as much as possible. Other stereotypies may feature or result in various forms of self-harm, which are of course more dangerous. Birds pluck their feathers, horses nip at their flanks, canids, felids, and bears over-groom themselves, turtles may bite their legs, and snakes may chew on their tails. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18245 - Posted: 06.08.2013

By Susan Milius Lyrebirds are famous for the mimicked sounds they sing, but they now have another claim to fame: They dance to their own songs. “Just as we waltz to waltz music but we salsa to salsa music, so lyrebirds perform different dance movements to different types of songs,” says Anastasia Dalziell of the Australian National University in Canberra. She and her colleagues scrutinized videos of male superb lyrebirds (Menura novaehollandiae) showing off in the wild for possible mates. The males’ combinations of hums, clicks, trills and other sexy syllables fell into four distinctive song types, the researchers say. At least the first three types are not mimicry but lyrebird originals, Dalziell says. In courtship, males sing the songs in a fairly predictable order and usually match each to its own mix of dance moves and postures. The birds side-step, turn and flare their outsized lyre-shaped tails. Matching a type of music with a style of gesture is not unique to humankind, the researchers report June 6 in Current Biology. Performing for females, a male lyrebird dances to the music he makes. And yes, the bird makes the noises heard in the video. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Language
Link ID: 18244 - Posted: 06.08.2013

By Susana Martinez-Conde This week’s illusion was discovered by Dartmouth College neuroscientist Peter Tse, author of “The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation“, and presented as a Top 10 finalist at the recent Best Illusion of the Year Contest. The Knobby Sphere Illusion tricks your sense of touch. To experience it, you will need a regular pencil (for instance, with a hexagonal cross-section, and a small hard sphere (such a marble or ball bearing). Squeeze the pencil lengthwise very hard between your thumb and first finger for a full minute, until you can see deep indentations in your skin. Now feel the sphere by rolling it around against the parts of your fingers where the indentations are. The sphere no longer feels round, but bumpy. Your brain assumes that the touch receptors in your skin lie on a flat sheet, and misattributes the skin deformations to the sphere. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 18243 - Posted: 06.08.2013

by Debora MacKenzie YOUR eye colour is a product of your DNA, but what about your IQ? The biggest-ever search for genes that affect intelligence, and the first to give reproducible results, has found 10 variations in DNA that seem to influence intelligence – but not by much. Studies of families show intelligence is 40 to 50 per cent inherited, and otherwise depends on environment. Since mass-analysis of DNA variations became possible, a number of studies have sought the genes involved in this inheritance, and some papers have claimed strong associations between particular genes and IQ. Yet results have varied widely and none have been replicated. "Many of the published findings of the last decade are wrong," says John Hewitt of the University of Colorado in Boulder, who was not involved in the new study. So if intelligence is inherited, where are the genes hiding? The research may have hit problems because each gene linked with IQ has only a tiny effect on overall intelligence. This means you need data on a large number of people to reliably distinguish such effects from measurement error. Most studies have involved between 100 and 2000 subjects. Now, some 200 researchers have assembled 54 sets of data on more than 126,000 people who have had their genomes analysed for 2.5 million common, small mutations called SNPs. Information was also available for how long they spent in education and the level they reached. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18242 - Posted: 06.06.2013

by Jennifer Viegas Dogs with obsessive compulsive disorder show nearly the same brain abnormalities of humans who have OCD, a new study finds. The discovery, published in Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry, adds another notch to the dog-human connection and holds promise for better treatments for OCD. “While the study sample was small and further research is needed, the results further validate that dogs with CCD (Canine Compulsive Disorder) can provide insight and understanding into anxiety disorders that affect people,” Nicholas Dodman, a professor of clinical sciences at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University who worked on the study, said in a press release. Dodman said that, in addition to having the same structural brain abnormalities as people with OCD, dogs also show similar behaviors, respond to the same medications and seem to have similar genetic roots to the disorder. Dogs with CCD engage in repetitious and destructive behaviors, such as flank and blanket-sucking, tail chasing and chewing. The main thing — and this is true for humans as well — is that the activity or thought is repetitive and persistent, such that it’s time consuming and interferes with normal daily routines. For dogs, Dobermans appear to be a breed that is most at risk, likely due to their genetics. © 2013 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: OCD - Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
Link ID: 18241 - Posted: 06.06.2013

Sid Perkins The near-complete fossil of a tiny creature unearthed in China in 2002 has bolstered the idea that the anthropoid group of primates — whose modern-day members include monkeys, apes and humans — had appeared by at least 55 million years ago. The fossil primate does not belong to that lineage, however: it is thought to be the earliest-discovered ancestor of small tree-dwelling primates called tarsiers, showing that even at this early time, the tarsier and anthropoid groups had split apart. The slender-limbed, long-tailed primate, described today in Nature1, was about the size of today’s pygmy mouse lemur and would have weighed between 20 and 30 grams, the researchers estimate. The mammal sports an odd blend of features, with its skull, teeth and limb bones having proportions resembling those of tarsiers, but its heel and foot bones more like anthropoids. “This mosaic of features hasn’t been seen before in any living or fossil primate,” says study author Christopher Beard, a palaeontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. By analysing almost 1,200 morphological aspects of the fossil and comparing them to those of 156 other extant and extinct mammals, the team put the ancient primate near the base of the tarsier family tree. The creature is dubbed Archicebus achilles, in which the genus name Archicebus roughly translates as 'original long-tailed monkey', while the species name achilles is a wry nod to the primate's anthropoid-like heel bone. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 18240 - Posted: 06.06.2013

By GRETCHEN REYNOLDS For thousands of years, coffee has been one of the two or three most popular beverages on earth. But it’s only recently that scientists are figuring out that the drink has notable health benefits. In one large-scale epidemiological study from last year, researchers primarily at the National Cancer Institute parsed health information from more than 400,000 volunteers, ages 50 to 71, who were free of major diseases at the study’s start in 1995. By 2008, more than 50,000 of the participants had died. But men who reported drinking two or three cups of coffee a day were 10 percent less likely to have died than those who didn’t drink coffee, while women drinking the same amount had 13 percent less risk of dying during the study. It’s not clear exactly what coffee had to do with their longevity, but the correlation is striking. Other recent studies have linked moderate coffee drinking — the equivalent of three or four 5-ounce cups of coffee a day or a single venti-size Starbucks — with more specific advantages: a reduction in the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, basal cell carcinoma (the most common skin cancer), prostate cancer, oral cancer and breast cancer recurrence. Perhaps most consequential, animal experiments show that caffeine may reshape the biochemical environment inside our brains in ways that could stave off dementia. In a 2012 experiment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, mice were briefly starved of oxygen, causing them to lose the ability to form memories. Half of the mice received a dose of caffeine that was the equivalent of several cups of coffee. After they were reoxygenated, the caffeinated mice regained their ability to form new memories 33 percent faster than the uncaffeinated. Close examination of the animals’ brain tissue showed that the caffeine disrupted the action of adenosine, a substance inside cells that usually provides energy, but can become destructive if it leaks out when the cells are injured or under stress. The escaped adenosine can jump-start a biochemical cascade leading to inflammation, which can disrupt the function of neurons, and potentially contribute to neurodegeneration or, in other words, dementia. Copyright 2013 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Alzheimers
Link ID: 18239 - Posted: 06.06.2013

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News An experimental treatment to stop the body attacking its own nervous system in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) appears safe in trials. The sheath around nerves cells, made of myelin, is destroyed in MS, leaving the nerves struggling to pass on messages. A study on nine patients, reported in Science Translational Medicine, tried to train the immune system to cease its assault on myelin. The MS Society said the idea had "exciting potential". As nerves lose their ability to talk to each other, the disease results in problems moving and balancing and can affect vision. There are drugs that can reduce number and severity of attacks, but there is no cure. The disease is caused by the body's immune system thinking that myelin is a foreign body like a flu virus. Researchers at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine developed a technique to retrain the immune system. They took blood samples and coupled white blood cells, a part of the immune system, to fragments of myelin. This was injected back into the patients to make them tolerate myelin. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 18238 - Posted: 06.06.2013

By Breanna Draxler Is it a coincidence that the word vole is an anagram of love? Probably so, but since prairie voles mate for life, they have since been designated as the unofficial species used to study monogamy in lab animals. And a new study finds that their rare partnerships are cemented by chemical changes on their genes, called epigenetic changes, that result from their sexual encounters. When a prairie vole (Microtus ochrogaster) finds a mate, the two form a strong bond. Not only do they stay together for life and share child care duties, but the lovers will guard their mates aggressively against voles of the opposite sex. Scientists knew from previous studies that this bonding was regulated by neurotransmitters—chemical communicators in the brain such as oxytocin, which is linked to sex and reproduction, and vasopressin, associated with social recognition. However researchers were unsure what the biological basis was for such a sharp behavioral shift after mating. To find out, scientists at Florida State University paired up virgin male and female voles and gave the couples a cage together for a number of hours. Some couples were allowed to mate while others were prevented from doing so. The non-mating female voles instead received drug injections in the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain’s pleasure center. The drugs affected the voles’ epigenetics by unwinding their DNA so that genes for vasopressin and oxytocin receptors were more highly transcribed.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 18237 - Posted: 06.06.2013

A patient at the Kwong Wah and Queen Elizabeth Hospitals discovered he was also a woman when he came for treatment for a swelling abdomen. Photo: Nora Tam A 66-year-old apparently male patient made a stunning discovery when he sought treatment for swelling in his abdomen. The swelling was a cyst on his ovary and he was in fact a woman. The condition was caused by a very rare combination of two genetic disorders. One, Turner syndrome, causes women to lack some female features, including the ability to get pregnant. Sufferers usually look like women, but in this case the patient also had congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), which boosted the male hormones and made the patient look like a man. The case was reported by doctors from Kwong Wah Hospital and Queen Elizabeth Hospital, who treated the patient. It was published in the Hong Kong Medical Journal yesterday. "The patient, by definition, is a woman who cannot get pregnant. But she also has CAH, which gave her the appearance of a man," Chinese University paediatrics professor Ellis Hon Kam-lun said. "It's an interesting and very rare case of having the two combinations. It probably won't be seen again in the near future." The 66-year-old Vietnam-born Chinese man is an orphan. He has a beard, small penis and no testes. Just 1.37 metres tall, he has decided to continue perceiving himself as a male and may receive male hormone treatment, the report said. © 2013 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 18236 - Posted: 06.06.2013

By Geoffrey Mohan Hyperactive brain cells firing together could be an early indicator of autism and developmental disabilities, a team of UCLA researchers has found. Networks of neurons were found to be firing in a highly synchronized and seemingly unrelenting fashion, even through sleep, in the brains of juvenile mice that have a genetic abnormality similar to one that causes mental retardation and autism symptoms in humans, according to the research published online Monday in Nature Neuroscience. Without independently firing neurons, the human brain would be about as functionally complicated as a digital switch. With it, we compose poetry and send robotic carts to Mars. "If you want to code information, you can’t just have all the cells fire together or not, because then that’s just binary. It goes up and down," said UCLA neuroscientist Carlos Portera-Cailliau, a lead author of the report. “But if you have billions of neurons, all firing independently or in small clusters, then you can code a lot of information.” That “de-synchronization” was greatly diminished in the neocortex of the juvenile mice that had been altered so that they lack the same protein known to cause mental retardation and autistic behaviors in humans. These so-called Fmr1 Knockout mice, named for the gene that is knocked out, exhibit autism behaviors, among them social deficits – they don’t go over and sniff and examine a new mouse introduced to the cage, like wild mice would. Copyright 2013

Keyword: Autism
Link ID: 18235 - Posted: 06.05.2013

by Kim Krieger The song of the cicada has been romanticized in mariachi music, used to signify summer in Japanese cinematography, and cursed by many an American suburbanite wishing for peace and quiet. Despite the bugs' ubiquity, scientists haven't uncovered how they sing so loudly—some are as noisy as a jet engine—and why they don't expend much energy doing it. But researchers reported in Montreal yesterday at the 21st International Congress on Acoustics that they now have the answer. The detailed mechanism of the cicada's song is far from fully understood, says Paulo Fonseca, an animal acoustician at the University of Lisbon who was not involved in the project. The work by the researchers "is innovative and paves our way to a better understanding of this complex system allowing such small animals to produce such powerful sound." Cicadas aren't just a natural curiosity. Small devices that produce extremely loud noises while requiring very little power appeal to the U.S. Navy, which uses sonar for underwater exploration and communication. Derke Hughes, a research engineer at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, says that the loudest cicadas can make a noise 20 to 40 dB louder than the compact off-the-shelf RadioShack speaker in his office using the same amount of power. Intrigued, he and his colleagues used microcomputed tomography)—a kind of CT scan that picks up details as small as a micron in size—to image a cicada's tymbal, which helps the insect make its deafening chirp. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Hearing; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 18234 - Posted: 06.05.2013

Matt Kaplan Just as city slickers have faster-paced lives than country folk, so too do urban birds, compared with their forest-dwelling cousins. The reason, researchers report today, is that urban noise and light have altered the city birds’ biological clocks1. The finding helps to explain prior reports that urban songbirds adopt more nocturnal lifestyles2–4 — data that prompted Davide Dominoni, an ecologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Radolfzell, Germany, to investigate whether the birds’ activity patterns were merely behavioural responses to busy cities or were caused by an actual shift in the animals' body clocks. For the study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Dominoni and his colleagues set up an experiment with European blackbirds (Turdus merula). The scientists attached tiny 2.2-gram radio-pulse transmitters to blackbirds living in Munich, Germany, as well as to those living in a nearby forest. The transmitters monitored the birds’ activity for three weeks. Dominoni found that whereas forest birds started their activity at dawn, city birds began 29 minutes earlier, on average, and remained active for 6 minutes longer in the evening. Keen to determine these differences were due to physiological changes, Dominoni collected blackbirds from both locations and placed them into light- and sound-proof enclosures. For ten days these enclosures were illuminated with a constant, dim light so the birds had no idea what time of day it was, and their activity patterns were monitored. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Biological Rhythms
Link ID: 18233 - Posted: 06.05.2013

By Piercarlo Valdesolo The posed stare-down is a staple of the pre-fight ritual. Two fighters, one day removed from attempting to beat the memories from each other, stand impossibly close, raise their clenched fists and fix their gaze on the other’s eyes as cameras click away. This has always seemed little more than a vehicle for media hype, but new research from psychologists at the University of Illinois suggests that there may be clues in this bit of theatre that predict the results of the fight to come. Specifically, the researchers hypothesized that there’s something about the fighters’ facial expressions in this standoff that reveal the competitive dynamics between them. A subtle, and perhaps unintentional, communication of submission from one fighter to the other. A recognition of the opponent’s power. The smile. Facial expressions have long been thought to be reliable indicators of a person’s true feelings. Indeed, in his book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals” Darwin suggested that such expressions have evolved precisely because they serve this important function. The smile has attracted much empirical attention and has generally been interpreted as a signal of an individuals’ immediate, as well as long-term, well-being. In a particularly interesting study, the frequency and “authenticity” of smiles in high school yearbook photos tended to predict higher levels of subjective well-being years later. But smiles can mean different things in different contexts. The researchers here were particularly interested in what a smile might mean when displayed between competitors. Instead of merely communicating a fighter’s good spirits, the researchers hypothesized that it would be a submissive signal that reveals a fighter’s reduced hostility and lower willingness to aggress towards the opponent. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Aggression; Emotions
Link ID: 18232 - Posted: 06.05.2013