by Wendy Zukerman Ever struggled to get an annoyingly catchy tune out of your head? Blame your right anterior temporal lobe – a thumb-shaped region of the brain just behind the right ear. Damage to this brain region in people with some forms of dementia is what leaves them unable to recognise famous melodies, a study suggests. Olivier Piguet and colleagues at Neuroscience Research Australia in Sydney wanted to understand why people with Alzheimer's disease have difficulties with memory, yet can remember information if it is sung to them. One clue comes from a 2006 study which found that the right anterior temporal lobe is responsible for the way we understand words and concepts. To find out more, Piguet asked 27 volunteers with dementia to listen to pairs of tunes. Fourteen volunteers had Alzheimer's and 13 had semantic dementia (SD), a condition in which people can speak fluently but lose the ability to remember the names of objects, people and abstract concepts. Twenty healthy volunteers also participated. Piguet suspected that people with SD would have more trouble than those with Alzheimer's when it came to identifying tunes. If so, he could pinpoint the area of the brain responsible for processing music by comparing which brain regions were damaged in the two groups. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Alzheimers; Hearing
Link ID: 15753 - Posted: 09.01.2011

Matt Kaplan The discovery of stone axes in the same sediment layer as cruder tools indicates that hominins with differing tool-making technologies may have coexisted. The axes, found in Kenya by Christopher Lepre, a palaeontologist at Columbia University in New York, and his team are estimated to be around 1.76 million years old. That's 350,000 years older than any other complex tools yet discovered. The finding, described today in Nature1, includes another important discovery: the hand axes, usually associated with the emergence around 1.5 million years ago of Homo erectus as the dominant hominin species, were found alongside primitive chopping tools that had already been in use for at least a million years. "This supports the idea that the two earliest stone-tool manufacturing techniques and traditions were, at least sometimes, utilized contemporaneously," says palaeoanthropologist Briana Pobiner at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. Chip off the old block The hand axes, which have a distinctive, carefully made oval shape, are part of the Acheulian technology — those tools thought to have been developed around 1.6 million years ago. The more primitive tools, typically chunks of stone with crudely-chipped edges, belong to the earlier Oldowan toolkit. Because H. erectus is often associated with Acheulian tools, Lepre and his colleagues suggest that the hand axes they found might have been made by H. erectus, and the Oldowan tools by the less cognitively-capable Homo habilis. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 15752 - Posted: 09.01.2011

Kerri Smith The experiment helped to change John-Dylan Haynes's outlook on life. In 2007, Haynes, a neuroscientist at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, put people into a brain scanner in which a display screen flashed a succession of random letters1. He told them to press a button with either their right or left index fingers whenever they felt the urge, and to remember the letter that was showing on the screen when they made the decision. The experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to reveal brain activity in real time as the volunteers chose to use their right or left hands. The results were quite a surprise. "The first thought we had was 'we have to check if this is real'," says Haynes. "We came up with more sanity checks than I've ever seen in any other study before." The conscious decision to push the button was made about a second before the actual act, but the team discovered that a pattern of brain activity seemed to predict that decision by as many as seven seconds. Long before the subjects were even aware of making a choice, it seems, their brains had already decided. As humans, we like to think that our decisions are under our conscious control — that we have free will. Philosophers have debated that concept for centuries, and now Haynes and other experimental neuroscientists are raising a new challenge. They argue that consciousness of a decision may be a mere biochemical afterthought, with no influence whatsoever on a person's actions. According to this logic, they say, free will is an illusion. "We feel we choose, but we don't," says Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist at University College London. © 2011 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 15751 - Posted: 09.01.2011

By ANAHAD O'CONNOR Earlier studies have tied chronic sleep disorders and low levels of sleep to greater risks of heart disease and obesity, and even reduced life span. But the new study, published in the journal Hypertension, is one of the first to find that it’s not just how much you sleep, but the the quality of your nightly slumber that can affect your risk for high blood pressure. The goal of the study, carried out by researchers at Harvard Medical School and elsewhere, was to look specifically at the slow-wave stages of sleep, which make up about 90 minutes to two hours of a normal night’s rest and represent the deepest hours of sleep. To study the effect of deep sleep on health, the scientists followed 784 healthy men who were part of an ongoing sleep study and did not have signs of high blood pressure at the start of the research. During the three-and-a-half year study, the men had their blood pressure checked at various times, and their levels of slow-wave sleep were monitored at home by a machine. After controlling for a number of variables, the researchers found that the men who spent the least time in slow-wave or deep sleep were the most likely to develop high blood pressure. Although a night of normal sleep should consist of about 25 percent slow-wave sleep, the men in the study who were at highest risk for hypertension managed to enjoy deep sleep for no more than 4 percent of their total sleep each night. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sleep
Link ID: 15750 - Posted: 09.01.2011

by Sarah C. P. Williams Dracula may have had it right: Young blood can restore an aging body. Scientists have discovered that blood from a 3-month-old mouse can coax the brain of an older mouse into making new brain cells. The team has not yet identified the rejuvenating factor, but they have found a blood-borne compound that seems to promote brain aging. As the body ages, the brain gradually becomes more sluggish. Even in people lucky enough to dodge neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, fewer new neurons are created from stem cells in the brain, and the activity of existing neurons weakens. Neuroscientist Tony Wyss-Coray of Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California, suspected that the changes could be mediated by factors in the blood. Previous research has shown that giving young blood to older mice boosts their immune system and muscle function. Wyss-Coray wondered whether the same might be true in the brain. Although the so-called blood-brain barrier blocks many large molecules from entering the brain from the bloodstream, the barrier isn't sealed tight everywhere, which might allow some compounds to get through. It's leakiest at places where there are brain stem cells, suggesting that these neuron precursors may have interaction with the circulatory system. Wyss-Coray's team measured neurogenesis, the creation of new neurons from stem cells, in mice that were 3 months old and mice that were almost 2 years old and considered adults. Then they surgically connected the circulatory systems of pairs of young and old mice. The number of new cells in one region of the brain's hippocampus, related to memory formation, went from fewer than 400 to almost 1000 in the older mice. In the younger mice, it dropped by almost a quarter. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Alzheimers; Neurogenesis
Link ID: 15749 - Posted: 09.01.2011

by Adrian Carter Most people would welcome more effective treatments for drug addiction: anyone close to someone with an addiction knows it can destroy families and lives. Recently, neuroscience has given us important insights into how changes in the brain produced by chronic drug use can lead to addiction, focussing the mind on drug use and making it difficult to stop using. This research has led some to argue that addiction is best thought of as "a chronic brain disease". Nora Volkow, the current director of the U.S. National Institute for Drug Addiction, believes that this research will foster greater acceptance of addiction as a disease requiring treatment, lessen the stigma associated with addiction, and ultimately lead to a cure. These are noble goals. However, neuroscientists also need to consider some less welcome consequences of adopting the brain disease view of addiction. Neuroscience has been used to justify highly invasive and dangerous interventions in the brain, such as psychosurgery. In China and Russia, neurosurgeons have tried to block drug use by destroying parts of the brains of addicted individuals (eg. the nucleus accumbens and the cingulated gyrus) that are implicated in motivation and the processing of reward. Unfortunately, the treatment was only minimally effective despite causing permanent brain damage. ©2006-10 Luna Media Pty Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 15748 - Posted: 09.01.2011

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC Nature Female yellow-bellied marmots that have many male litter-mates become "tom boys", according to a study of these big, playful rodents. Developing males produce testosterone, which circulates in the mother's uterus; this male sex hormone "masculinises" the females. The phenomenon has been seen in many species, but this study shows its long-term impact on animal behaviour. The findings are published in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters. Lead researcher Raquel Monclus explained that the results emerged from a 50-year study of the marmots in the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, Colorado. "We have data from generations of these animals that the lab has gathered," Dr Monclus told BBC Nature. She carried out the study while at the University of California, Los Angeles, and is now based at the UAM (Universidad Autonoma de Madrid) in Spain. The physical effects of testosterone were apparent early in this ongoing study, as it was much more difficult for the researchers to correctly identify the sex of newborn females from litters that were mostly male. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 15747 - Posted: 09.01.2011

RandyeKaye, a former radio personality in Connecticut, has just written a book, “Ben Behind His Voices: One family’s journey from the chaos of schizophrenia to hope,’’ about life with her son. A. I had always wanted to share our family’s story. One of the things that was so hard for us is I felt so alone - like nobody else’s kid had a mental illness, what’s wrong with my son, what did I do wrong? I wanted to spread the message of exactly what families go through and that recovery is possible, and some of the ways to deal with things. Q. Your son wasn’t diagnosed until years after he started acting oddly and had psychotic episodes that potentially damaged his brain. Do you resent the fact that he wasn’t diagnosed sooner? A. A lot of symptoms of mental illnesses overlap. I look back now [at the] typical pattern of gradual onset schizophrenia, and my son hit every single point: from extreme brightness, to being slightly anxious as a child, to having difficulty organizing his thoughts, to mood swings, and then to isolation from his peers. But if you look at any of those symptoms, it could be plain old adolescence, it could be drug use. There’s no way to test [for] it. Q. Mental illness can also be a financial catastrophe as well as an emotional one for a family. Did you experience that? A. My son’s college fund went to cure symptoms of an illness I didn’t know was there. A lot of families [facing mental illness] say you either have no money and the system can help you, or you have money and the system will help you when you’re out of money. Medications alone can be $6,000 a month. © 2011 NY Times Co

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 15746 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By Sandra G. Boodman, Right away the obstetrician knew that something was very wrong. Morgan McElhinney weighed just over five pounds and had a head that was abnormally long and narrow. Her muscle tone was worrisomely floppy, and her cry unusually weak. Doctors at Frederick Memorial Hospital let Lisa Simonson McElhinney hold her newborn briefly before whisking her off to the neonatal intensive care unit. “I didn’t see her much for a few days,” recalled McElhinney of the period immediately following the birth of her fourth child, in June 2002. After nearly a week in the hospital the baby was sent home, although no one could say what was wrong. Initial tests found no obvious cause, such as a metabolic disorder. “We were scared,” said McElhinney, who manages apartment buildings in Frederick. “You try to be optimistic and say, ‘Maybe she’s not that bad, maybe she’s just really early and will grow out of it.’ Even the professionals tried to be optimistic” at first, she said. More than five years would elapse before McElhinney and her husband, Brad, learned the reason for their daughter’s problems. That knowledge brought a fresh wave of grief that rocked McElhinney and drew her to a new endeavor aimed at helping other families. The first sign something was amiss, said McElhinney, now 46, came just before she went into labor, when the baby turned from the foot-first breech position to the proper head-down position. © 1996-2011 The Washington Post

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15745 - Posted: 08.30.2011

PERTH, Australia — Dolphins in one western Australian population have been observed holding a large conch shell in their beaks and using it to shake a fish into their mouths — and the behavior may be spreading. Researchers from Murdoch University in Perth were not quite sure what they were seeing when they first photographed the activity, in 2007, in which dolphins would shake conch shells at the surface of the ocean. "It's a fleeting glimpse — you look at it and think, that's kind of weird," said Simon Allen, a researcher at the university's Cetacean Research Unit. "Maybe they're playing, maybe they're socializing, maybe males are presenting a gift to a female or something like that, maybe the animals are actually eating the animal inside," he added. But researchers were more intrigued when they studied the photos and found the back of a fish hanging out of the shell, realizing that the shaking drained the water out of the shells and caused the fish that was sheltering inside to fall into the dolphins' mouths. A search through records for dolphins in the eastern part of Shark Bay, a population that has been studied for nearly 30 years, found roughly half a dozen sightings of similar behavior over some two decades. Copyright 2011 Thomson Reuters.

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 15744 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By Jennifer Viegas Years of either running from or running after animals left its mark in the human brain -- even just looking at a photo of an animal jolts our brains into action. No matter how high tech and urban we may become, animals continue to affect our brains like no other person, place or thing, shows new research in the latest issue of Nature Neuroscience. Co-author Ralph Adolphs explained to Discovery News "that it is important for the brain to be able to rapidly detect animals. The reasons for this are probably several, but would likely include the need to avoid predators and catch prey." "These abilities are at once critically important to survival and yet very difficult to do," added Adolphs, a professor of psychology, neuroscience and biology at the California Institute of Technology. "Both predator and prey detection requires fast, real-time detection of shapes that are often camouflaged in a cluttered environment." Adolphs, project leader Florian Mormann, and their colleagues recorded how the brains of 41 neurosurgical patients undergoing epilepsy monitoring responded to images of people, landmarks, animals, or objects. During 111 experimental sessions, the researchers monitored the subjects' brain activity as they sat in bed while viewing about 100 images per session. The monitoring was quite precise, showing how even individual neurons reacted. athletes © 2011 Discovery Communications, LLC

Keyword: Attention; Evolution
Link ID: 15743 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By Tina Hesman Saey Friendly intestinal bacteria not only keep the gut happy, they may help keep their host happy, too, a new study in mice finds. Mice fed broth fortified with a type of friendly intestinal bacteria called Lactobacillus rhamnosus behaved less anxiously than mice fed broth without bacteria. Those behavior changes were accompanied by differences in levels of a brain-chemical sensor and stress hormones. The bacteria telegraph these brain-chemical and behavior-changing messages via the vagus nerve, which connects the brain stem to various internal organs, researchers report online August 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Some studies have suggested that changing the mix of bacteria in the intestines could influence behavior (SN: 6/18/11, p. 26). The new research goes a step further to investigate how those changes come about, says Paul Patterson, a neuroimmunologist at Caltech in Pasadena, Calif. “Most people haven’t gone that far to look at what’s happening in the brain,” he says. The research team — led by John Bienenstock of McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and John Cryan of the University College Cork in Ireland — looked at the mice’s brains to examine levels of the GABA receptor, a protein that senses and responds to an important brain chemical messenger called GABA. Alterations in the way GABA and other brain chemical systems work influence behavior. Mice fed bacteria-containing broth had higher levels of the receptor protein in some parts of the brain and lower levels in other parts than did mice fed sterile broth. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 15742 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By Bruce Bower Culture may hold a spatial place in thought. Social forces profoundly influence people’s ability to think about three-dimensional objects, a new study suggests. In tests of spatial ability, men traditionally outperform women. But men’s spatial superiority disappears among Northeast India’s Khasi villagers, say economist Moshe Hoffman of the University of California, San Diego and his colleagues. In Khasi society, youngest daughters inherit property, men forward earnings to wives or sisters, and females get as much schooling as males. Among neighboring Karbi villagers, men display spatial-thinking advantages over women, similar to those in many Western societies, Hoffman’s team reports in an upcoming Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In Karbi society, males inherit and own land and receive more education than females. “These results show that nurture plays an important role in the gender gap in spatial abilities,” Hoffman says. But some researchers who study sex differences in thinking view the study skeptically. It’s not clear that the study in fact measured spatial ability, remarks psychologist Richard Lippa of California State University, Fullerton. Hoffman and colleagues measured spatial ability as the time taken to solve a four-piece jigsaw puzzle. But they didn’t assess volunteers’ accuracy at mentally rotating 3D figures and performing other spatial tasks, Lippa notes. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 15741 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By AMANDA SCHAFFER Ever since the New York Yankees Hall of Famer Lou Gehrig benched himself in 1939, never to return to the game, the ailment that now bears his name has stoked dread in the American imagination. Lou Gehrig’s disease — also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S. — has afflicted well-known figures like the jazz great Charles Mingus, the physicist Stephen Hawking and the historian Tony Judt. The disease stems from the progressive deterioration of nerve cells, leading to a loss of control over voluntary muscles, difficulty breathing and swallowing, creeping paralysis and eventually death. There is no cure and no good treatment. Scientists are still unsure exactly what causes most cases. But in the journal Nature last week, researchers at Northwestern University identified a possible culprit: a cellular housekeeping agent that normally helps cells to clear away proteins that are damaged or misfolded. When the housekeeper fails, proteins seem to aggregate inside nerve cells, which may be contributing to their destruction. The finding has been hailed as a breakthrough by patient groups and scientists. The new work is “fueling great enthusiasm and interest,” said Dr. Amelie Gubitz of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, which helped finance the new work. Still, it is far from clear that this is the wellspring of A.L.S. There are at least a dozen processes that also might contribute to the demise of motor nerve cells, Dr. Gubitz noted. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 15740 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By ALIYAH BARUCHIN FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — On a sweltering morning on a red-earth lane a few blocks from the largest mosque in this West African capital, Jeneba Kabba stands up. A tall, striking woman with a serious manner, Mrs. Kabba has been sitting under an awning in the outdoor classroom of a vocational training program for people with epilepsy. Every weekday, some 20 Sierra Leoneans, from teenagers to adults in middle age, gather here to learn skills like tailoring, weaving, tie-dyeing and soap-making, as well as reading — skills that, in this society, will give them a chance to earn a living. Mrs. Kabba, 30, a graduate of the program, is now a tutor. Her composure belies what she has survived. As a teenager she was taken to a traditional healer, who boiled herbs and made her inhale the fumes from a steam tent for hours. The treatment was supposed to drive out the demons thought to cause epilepsy; she nearly fainted and could have been burned. But worse was yet to come: She was forced to drink a two-liter bottle of kerosene. “Mi ches don cook,” she says in the Krio language, her voice faltering even now: “My chest started to boil.” Only a panicked trip to the hospital saved her life. Mrs. Kabba not only survived, but has been seizure-free for 10 years with the help of phenobarbital, one of the oldest anti-epileptic drugs and virtually the only one available here. And in a country where people with epilepsy are often considered uneducable, unemployable and unmarriageable, Mrs. Kabba teaches, is happily married and has a child. © 2011 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Epilepsy
Link ID: 15739 - Posted: 08.30.2011

By Nicole Gray A mother's age is often considered a genetic risk factor for offspring, but research is now pointing the finger at fathers, too—particularly when it comes to the mental health of their progeny. Males may have the advantage of lifelong fertility, but as they grow older, the rate of genetic mutations passed on via their sperm cells increases significantly—putting their children at increased risk for psychiatric disorders, especially autism and schizophrenia. Two recent studies support this link at least associatively, but experts remain uncertain if age is the cause of these problems. The Malaysian Mental Health Survey (MMHS) results, which were published online in March 2011, for instance, revealed that people with older parents as well as those whose fathers were at least 11 years older than their mothers, were at increased risk for certain mental health disorders, including anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder and phobias. Offspring whose fathers were 19 or younger when the child was born had just a 9 percent prevalence of mental health disorders. Regardless of paternal age, however, if the father was 11 years or older than the mother, that rate jumped to 24 percent. The greatest risk of mental health disorders—42 percent—was seen in the children of fathers aged 50 and older, with wives at least 11 years younger than their husbands. The link between paternal age and increased risk of mental illness has long been recognized by practitioners, but researchers are beginning to unravel more details: "We have known that the children of older men have higher susceptibility to sporadic disease since the 1970s, but there has been an explosion of research in this area," says Dolores Malaspina, a professor of psychiatry and environmental medicine at New York University and a leader in the field of paternal age-related schizophrenia (PARS). © 2011 Scientific American,

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Autism
Link ID: 15738 - Posted: 08.30.2011

by Patti Neighmond We've all heard the theory that some students are visual learners, while others are auditory learners. And still other kids learn best when lessons involve movement. But should teachers target instruction based on perceptions of students' strengths? Several psychologists say education could use some "evidence-based" teaching techniques, not unlike the way doctors try to use "evidence-based medicine." Psychologist Dan Willingham at the University of Virginia, who studies how our brains learn, says teachers should not tailor instruction to different kinds of learners. He says we're on more equal footing than we may think when it comes to how our brains learn. And it's a mistake to assume students will respond and remember information better depending on how it's presented. For example, if a teacher believes a student to be a visual learner, he or she might introduce the concept of addition using pictures or groups of objects, assuming that child will learn better with the pictures than by simply "listening" to a lesson about addition. In fact, an entire industry has sprouted based on learning styles. There are workshops for teachers, products targeted at different learning styles and some schools that even evaluate students based on this theory. This prompted Doug Rohrer, a psychologist at the University of South Florida, to look more closely at the learning style theory. When he reviewed studies of learning styles, he found no scientific evidence backing up the idea.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15737 - Posted: 08.30.2011

by Brooke Borei Just one encounter with an aroma can sear the scent into your memory for years. The same thing happens in rats, and researchers from the University of Bordeaux in France have exploited this to gain important insight into memory formation. When the brain encounters an odor, it temporarily saves the data in the banana-shaped hippocampus. But it is the frontal cortex that eventually encodes the memory into long-term storage. To decipher how that process unfolds, neurobiologist Bruno Bontempi and colleagues took advantage of a rather rude behavior in rats: The rodents often smell the breath of their fellow creatures to determine whether a new food is safe to eat. A single encounter can generate a lasting memory of the agreeable meal. In their study, Bontempi’s team fed cumin-spiced food to a set of rats and then introduced them to another group, whose frontal cortex had been temporarily cut off from communication with the hippocampus. One week later, the altered rats still enjoyed grub flavored with the spice, as expected. A month out, however, their preference for cumin had vanished—confirmation that long-term memories cannot form without a link between the hippocampus and the frontal cortex. Bontempi proposes that the hippo­campus tags cells in the cortex at the moment of a memory-generating experience. Breaking communication between the brain regions may interfere with tagging and subsequently handicap long-term memory. For rats, that means forgetting a morsel is safe. © 2011, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 15736 - Posted: 08.29.2011

By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News People with psoriasis have nearly three times the normal risk of stroke and abnormal heart rhythm, according to scientists in Denmark. A study of 4.5 million people, published in the European Heart Journal, showed the highest risk was in young patients with severe psoriasis. Researchers believe this may be because the skin and blood vessels may share similar sources of inflammation. The Stroke Association said this should not be an immediate cause for concern. Skin cells are normally replaced every three to four weeks but, in patients with psoriasis, that process can be greatly speeded up. It can take between just two and six days, resulting in red, flaky, crusty patches on the skin. The condition affects 2% of people in the UK and the cause is unknown. Researchers analysed data from everyone in Denmark between 1997 and 2006 - 36,765 had mild psoriasis and 2,793 had the severe form of the condition. In patients under 50 with mild psoriasis, the risk of abnormal heart rhythm - atrial fibrillation - increased by 50%. The risk of ischaemic stroke increased by 97%. BBC © 2011

Keyword: Stress; Stroke
Link ID: 15735 - Posted: 08.29.2011

By Bruce Bower LAS VEGAS — Recent economic woes in the United States may have triggered a temporary upturn in the use of harsh parenting methods by mothers carrying a particular gene variant. Mothers who inherited either one or two copies of a particular form of the dopamine D2 receptor gene, dubbed DRD2, cited sharp rises in spanking, yelling and other aggressive parenting methods for six to seven months after the onset of the economic recession in December 2007, sociologist Dohoon Lee of New York University reported August 22 at the American Sociological Association’s annual meeting. Hard-line child-rearing approaches then declined for a few months and remained stable until a second drop to pre-recession levels started around June 2009, the research showed. Mothers who didn’t inherit the gene variant displayed no upsurge in aggressive parenting styles after the recession started, Lee and his colleagues found. As the recession progressed, mothers with the critical DRD2 variant apparently adjusted to tougher economic times enough to allow for a return to pre-recession parenting practices, Lee proposes. Economic uncertainty may prompt harsh parenting in genetically predisposed individuals as much as economic hardship and poverty do, Lee said. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2011

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 15734 - Posted: 08.29.2011