CHICAGO - In a stunning improvement in children's health, far fewer children have high lead levels than 20 years ago, according to new government research. Federal researchers credited the improvement on aggressive efforts to reduce children's exposure to lead in old house paint, soil, water, and other sources. Lead can interfere with the developing nervous system and cause permanent problems with learning, memory, and behavior. Children in poor neighborhoods have generally been more at risk because they tend to live in older housing and in industrial areas. Researchers found that just 1.4 percent of young children had elevated lead levels in their blood in 2004, the latest data available. That compares with almost 9 percent in 1988. "It has been a remarkable decline," said Mary Jean Brown of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a coauthor of the study. "It's a public health success story." The 84 percent drop extends a trend that began in the 1970s when efforts began to remove lead from gasoline. The study was being released today in the March edition of the journal Pediatrics. It is based on nearly 5,000 children, ages 1 to 5, who were part of a periodic government health survey. © 2009 NY Times Co.

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Neurotoxins
Link ID: 12603 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Why do people do good things? Is kindness hard-wired into the brain, or does this tendency arise via experience? Or is goodness some combination of nature and nurture? Dacher Keltner, director of the Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory, investigates these questions from multiple angles, and often generates results that are both surprising and challenging. In his new book, Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life, Keltner weaves together scientific findings with personal narrative to uncover the innate power of human emotion to connect people with each other, which he argues is the path to living the good life. Keltner was kind enough to take some time out to discuss altruism, Darwinism, neurobiology and practical applications of his findings with David DiSalvo. DISALVO: You have a book that was just released called Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. What in a nutshell does the term “born to be good” mean to you, and what are you hoping people learn from reading the book? KELTNER: “Born to be good” for me means that our mammalian and hominid evolution have crafted a species—us—with remarkable tendencies toward kindness, play, generosity, reverence and self-sacrifice, which are vital to the classic tasks of evolution—survival, gene replication and smooth functioning groups. These tendencies are felt in the wonderful realm of emotion—emotions such as compassion, gratitude, awe, embarrassment and mirth. These emotions were of interest to Darwin, and Darwin-inspired studies have revealed that our capacity for caring, for play, for reverence and modesty are built into our brains, bodies, genes and social practices. My hopes for potential readers are numerous. I hope they learn about the remarkable wisdom of Darwin and the wonders of the study of emotion. I hope they come to look at human nature in a new light, one that is more hopeful and sanguine. I hope they may see the profoundly cooperative nature of much of our daily social living. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Aggression; Emotions
Link ID: 12602 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower In a virtual setting where fifth-graders become wizards and athletes, and even change sexes, preteens stay true to their real-world selves. Classic sex differences in play preferences, characterized by rough-and-tumble games among boys and intimate conversations among girls, still exist after youngsters adopt a range of personas for virtual encounters, investigators find. Boys who create girl avatars — or computerized altar egos — and girls who create boy avatars still behave consistently with their biological sex, say psychologist Sandra Calvert of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and her colleagues. In their new study, published online February 20 in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, about 13 percent of fifth-graders chose opposite-sex avatars, a practice the researchers call gender-bending. Pairs of kids — all of whom knew each other — experimented more with avatar identities than pairs of unfamiliar children did in a similar, 2003 study led by Calvert. Same-sex pairs showed this pattern most strongly. As fifth-graders learned to construct avatars and use these characters to interact with others in a multi-user domain, or MUD, experimentation with avatar costumes, sexes and names increased sharply. But as in real-world play, MUD play centered on self-exploration rather than self-alteration, Calvert asserts. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 12601 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Solmaz Barazesh Making tough choices won’t get any easier, but scientists have discovered that different types of decisions are made in different areas of the brain’s frontal lobes. Abstract decisions are made toward the front of the lobes and concrete decisions are made toward the back, researchers report in a study published online March 1 in Nature Neuroscience. The find could help scientists understand the organization of the frontal lobes and processes like learning and reasoning, the researchers say. Abstract decisions involve choosing between different categories of options, like deciding whether to send an e-mail or call on the phone instead. Concrete decisions involve translating thoughts into action, like deciding to hit a key to send the e-mail. The brain’s frontal lobes, which sit behind the forehead, “allow us to use what we know about the world to guide our decision making,” says neuroscientist and study coauthor David Badre of Brown University in Providence, R.I. Previous work has shown that neurons fire in different areas of the frontal lobes as different types of decisions are made. That led researchers to think the frontal lobes could be organized into areas with different decision-making tasks. But the new research “provides the first direct evidence of this,” comments neuroscientist Jean-Claude Dreher of the Institute for Cognitive Sciences at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Bron, France. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Attention
Link ID: 12600 - Posted: 06.24.2010

A gene linked to a type of motor neurone disease that runs in families has been found after a 10-year search. Along with a related gene reported last year, it opens up an unexplored area of research into the condition, investigators said. The finding will also help doctors screen and counsel families at risk of the disease, the US and UK team wrote in Science. Up to 10% of cases are inherited within families because of genetic mutations. Motor neurone disease (MND) involves the progressive wasting of the muscles, while usually leaving the mind unaffected. It affects some 5,000 people in the UK. The first MND gene - SOD1 - was found in 1993 and it has been a major focus of research. But then researchers found a protein called TDP-43 is deposited in the neurons of 90% of people with the condition. However, it was not apparent in animal models with the SOD1 mutation, suggesting that the first gene found is not linked with the major underlying biology of the disease. For the past decade the UK and US team have been looking for a gene believed to be located on chromosome 16. They eventually found a mutation in the FUS gene in one family with inherited MND - also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Further studies showed that 4% of all families had FUS mutations. The FUS gene is related to TDP-43, the gene for which was found by the same researchers last year. Professor Christopher Shaw, from the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London, said the FUS gene was a very important clue as to what causes motor neurons to degenerate. "It's very interesting, we really have wrung SOD1 out. We have looked at cells and mice endlessly, but the major pathways are not SOD pathways. The genetic pieces of the jigsaw puzzle are beginning to fit together, leading us in new and exciting directions of research." (C)BBC

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease
Link ID: 12599 - Posted: 02.28.2009

By DUFF WILSON AstraZeneca “buried” unfavorable studies of its $4.4 billion blockbuster psychiatric drug Seroquel, according to internal documents released Friday in a legal dispute between the company and lawyers for thousands of people who sued the company because they said the drug caused diabetes and weight gain. In one of the documents, a 1997 e-mail message, Richard Lawrence, an AstraZeneca official, praised Lisa Arventis, the company’s Seroquel project physician at the time, for minimizing adverse findings in a “cursed” study. He wrote: “Lisa has done a great ‘smoke-and-mirrors job!’ ” Lawyers suing AstraZeneca, a British drug maker whose United States headquarters are in Delaware, said the documents show it tried to hide the diabetes link for nearly a decade. “AstraZeneca knew about the risk of weight gain and diabetes in 2000 and not only failed to warn physicians and patients but marketed in a way that represented there was no risk,” Edward F. Blizzard, a Houston-based lead lawyer on the cases, said in a conference call with reporters. Tony Jewell, an AstraZeneca spokesman, said the plaintiffs’ lawyers were trying the case in public because they recently lost their first two cases in court. Judge Anne C. Conway of Federal District Court in Orlando, Fla., dismissed them on summary judgment on Jan. 28 for lack of evidence that the drug caused diabetes in those two cases. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 12598 - Posted: 06.24.2010

An experimental drug seems to help some people with multiple sclerosis to walk better, which could improve their quality of life, researchers said. In this week's issue of the medical journal the Lancet, neurologist Dr. Andrew Goodman of the University of Rochester Medical Center and his colleagues reported the results of their trial comparing Acorda Therapeutics' drug fampridine with a placebo. A progressive decline in mobility is a common feature of MS, and there are few pharmaceutical options to complement physiotherapy. "The data suggest that, for a sub-set of MS patients, nervous system function is partially restored while taking the drug," Goodman said in a statement. Goodman has served as a consultant to the company. "As a clinician, I can say that improvement in walking speed could have important psychological value; it may give individuals the potential to regain some of the independence that they may have lost in their daily lives," he added. The study looked at 301 adults in Canada and the U.S. with MS for 14 weeks. About 35 per cent of subjects who previously had trouble walking increased their walking speed after taking fampridine, compared with eight per cent in those randomly assigned to take a placebo. © CBC 2009

Keyword: Multiple Sclerosis
Link ID: 12597 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Brendan Borrell On Thursday morning, workers filing into the Santa Monica Pier Aquarium in California were surprised to find 200 gallons (750 liters) of seawater soaking into their spanking new, ecologically sensitive flooring. It turns out that a curious two-spotted octopus had disassembled a water recycling valve and directed a tube to spew out of the tank for about 10 hours, according to the Los Angeles Times. "It found something loose and just pulled on it," the aquarium's education manager Tara Treiber told the Times. "They are very smart creatures." Octopuses, some 300 species of which inhabit tropical waters around the world, can change colors, squirt out poison, and exert a force greater than their own body weight. But calling the eight-armed cousin of your garden snail "smart" seems a bit of a stretch. In fact, the animals are part of an elite group of slimy mollusks known as cephalopods that range from giant squid to the shelled nautilus and all have remarkably large "brains"—at least for creatures sans backbones. Scientists have found that octopuses can navigate their way through mazes, solve problems quickly and remember those solutions, at least for the short term. To find out more about octopus intelligence, we spoke to Jennifer Mather, a comparative psychologist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. Mather has been studying octopuses for 35 years in an effort to gain insight into the evolution of intelligence. While most scientists hold octopuses in high regard, it's worth noting that not everyone shares Mather's lofty assessment of their intellectual abilities and personalities. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc

Keyword: Evolution; Intelligence
Link ID: 12596 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Bruce Bower Human ancestors created some remarkably lasting impressions on the eastern African landscape around 1.5 million years ago. Walking across a muddy patch of terrain near what’s now Ileret, Kenya, these ancient individuals left footprints that hardened and have now been excavated by a team of scientists. On close inspection, the preserved footprints provide the oldest evidence for a virtually modern-human foot and walking style in a human ancestor, report geologist Matthew Bennett of Bournemouth University in Poole, England, and his colleagues in the Feb. 27 Science. Finding what amounts to the fossilized behavior of these creatures provides new clues to the evolution of upright stance and walking in modern humans. Bennett’s team identifies the ancestor as an early Africa-based Homo erectus, or Homo ergaster as some scientists call it. Measures of the size, spacing and depth of the Ileret impressions allowed the researchers to estimate individuals’ heights, weights and stride lengths, all of which fell within the range of modern humans. Digitized images of the newly discovered footprints show a big toe in line with the other toes, an arrangement that contrasts with the angled, grasping big toes of apes. Other humanlike features of the prints include a pronounced arch and short toes. access © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 12595 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Laura Sanders Prion protein, notorious for causing the brain-wasting mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases, may also be a coconspirator in Alzheimer’s disease, a new study in mice suggests. In mad cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases, misshapen prion proteins do the damage. But the new paper, appearing February 26 in Nature, offers evidence that the harmless version of the prion protein assists the amyloid-beta protein responsible for brain cell death in Alzheimer’s disease. “It’s pretty sensational,” comments Adriano Aguzzi, a neuropathologist at the University of Zurich. “What’s tremendously electrifying is that prion protein may be a genetic sensor for extremely toxic, small concentrations of A-beta.” A-beta proteins can travel alone or in groups in the brain. On their own, A-beta proteins are harmless. Massive, insoluble clumps of A-beta, known as plaques, are probably harmless, too, says study coauthor Stephen Strittmatter, a neuroscientist at Yale University. These plaques may be a gravestone marker of dead brain cells but are probably not the killer. Instead, smaller, soluble clumps of 50 to 100 A-beta proteins, known as oligomers, are the most likely suspect, Strittmatter says. Earlier studies have shown that mice with A-beta oligomers can’t remember how to get through a maze as quickly as mice without A-beta oligomers. Such oligomers prevent cross-talk between certain brain cells in the hippocampus of mice, which helps explain the loss of learning and memory functions in Alzheimer’s disease. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Prions; Alzheimers
Link ID: 12594 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Robert Pool FOR a few months in late 2006 and early 2007, the woman who called herself kristi4 was one of the best-known members of the pro-anorexia community. As the administrator of a blog on LiveJournal.com, she dispensed advice, encouraged others and wrote candidly about her own struggles. Then, late one Friday night, after a series of entries describing what she was planning to do, kristi4 killed herself with an overdose of prescription sleeping pills, muscle relaxants and painkillers. Her death was just one tragic data point in one of the most striking statistics in all of psychology. It has long been known that anorexia has the highest death rate of any mental illness: one out of every five people with anorexia eventually die of causes related to the disease. What has only now been recognised, however, is that a huge number of those deaths are from suicide rather than starvation. Someone who develops anorexia is 50 to 60 times more likely to kill themselves than people in the general population. No other group has a suicide rate anywhere near as high (Archives of General Psychiatry, vol 60, p 179). Recently, psychologists have tried to explain why anorexia and suicide are so intimately connected, something which is helping to answer the wider question of why anyone would commit suicide. If this explanation holds up, it will give psychiatrists a new tool for screening patients and determining which of them are most likely to kill themselves, perhaps saving lives. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Depression; Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 12593 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Ewen Callaway People's visceral reaction to incest or betrayal by others could stem from a natural aversion to potentially toxic foods, researchers argue. Subjects who swig nasty tasting liquids grimace in a similar way to people who view photos of open wounds or toilets covered in faeces, as well as people whose trust is violated. This overlap points to a common neural foundation for distaste and moral disgust, say Hanah Chapman and Adam Anderson - both psychologists at the University of Toronto. Common usage of the word disgust and its synonyms might reflect a deep connection between moral disgust and distaste, she says. "People will say that behaviour disgusts me, or so-and-so is repulsive, or that interaction left a bad taste in my mouth." Because people frequently employ the word disgust as a stand-in for anger, Chapman's team wanted a more objective measure of the emotion. They relied on electrical measurements of a facial muscle group called the levator labii, which runs along our cheeks. It wrinkles the nose and purses the lip. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 12592 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden Why waste time holding an election when children can look at pictures and pick the winners? Scientists showed a few years ago that such an approach worked for adults looking at mug shots of candidates for the U.S. Congress. Now two economists at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland have extended the findings to children, using candidates in the 2002 French parliamentary election. John Antonakis and Olaf Dalgas hypothesized that because "naïve" ratings based solely on facial appearance correlate with actual voter behavior, voters and children might have a lot in common. In one experiment, they showed 684 university students 57 pairs of faces--election winners and runners-up--and asked them to judge who looked more "competent." They found that the students chose the winner 60% of the time, a statistically significant deviation from random choices. Using the same pictures, the researchers got a 64% hit rate when they asked 681 children aged 5 through 13 to pick the "captain of their boat" in a computer game. The authors conclude, in a paper published tomorrow in Science, that the children used the same cues as adults when assessing a face. Princeton University psychologist Alexander Todorov, author of the earlier congressional elections paper, calls the findings "really striking." He agrees they suggest that the ways people infer traits from appearance "are surprisingly stable across the life span." Furthermore, he says, given that small Swiss children are no worse than adults in passing judgment on French politicians, it's unlikely that voters are basing their judgments on subconscious knowledge about candidates or learned associations between facial features and competence. © 2009 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 12591 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Jonah Lehrer I am a sucker for financial bubbles. The first stock I bought was Cisco Systems, in early 2000. It was the height of the dot-com bubble and Cisco was about to become the most valuable company in the world. Naturally my investment crashed too. I'd like to say that I learnt from my dot-com disaster, but I didn't. In late 2006 I began investing in blue-chip financial stocks, such as Citibank and Bank of America. At the time these companies were reporting record profits as they expanded into the sub-prime mortgage business. We all know how that turned out. If there's any consolation from my losses it's that I wasn't the only one. The current economic crisis is a by-product of collective failure, an example of terrible decision-making on a huge scale. Banks gave out loans to people who shouldn't have taken them, consumers got used to spending money they didn't have, regulators failed to regulate, and investors, appeased by ephemeral profits, failed to ask hard questions. In retrospect we can see the profound foolishness of this behaviour. Yet it's worth remembering that this is not the first time that the markets have gone haywire. The history of finance is largely a history of financial bubbles, from the tulip mania of 17th-century Holland to the South Sea Bubble of 18th-century England. Do we never learn? And, if not, why not? The answer to these questions returns us to the human brain, in particular a single neurotransmitter in the brain - dopamine - that seems to play a crucial role in shaping the behaviour of investors. While dopamine is an essential ingredient of cognition - it helps us to process and predict rewards, from a bite of chocolate cake to stock market profits - this neurotransmitter system can also be led astray, with often devastating consequences. Copyright 2009 Times Newspapers Ltd.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Parkinsons
Link ID: 12590 - Posted: 02.28.2009

By Tina Hesman Saey Yukon Cornelius isn’t the only one with a taste for metals. While most people probably can’t find silver and gold by nibbling snow, as Cornelius seems to do in the Rudolph movie*, new research shows that taste buds can detect iron, zinc, copper, magnesium and other metals. The source of metallic taste has long been elusive, but a study in the Feb. 25 Journal of Neuroscience traces the sensation to a combination of proteins used in detecting sweetness and the pain of red-hot chili peppers, and other as-of-yet unidentified proteins. Scientists used to believe that there were only a handful of tastes the tongue could register — sweet, sour, bitter, salty and umami, a delicious, meaty taste found in monosodium glutamate, Parmesan cheese and portobello mushrooms. Scientists define a taste as something that is detected by a specific combination of proteins in taste buds, as distinct from a flavor that results from a combination of tastes and odors. But it would be impossible to describe all the differences between chicken soup and lobster bisque using only the known tastes, says Johannes le Coutre of the Nestlé Research Center in Lausanne, Switzerland. So researchers think there are many other taste sensations. Le Coutre, Céline Riera and colleagues conducted the new study to find out if they could explain just one of them — metallic taste. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2009

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 12589 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR Scientists measured blood levels of the vitamin in a representative sample of 1,766 people over 65 and assessed their mental functioning with a widely used questionnaire. About 12 percent were cognitively impaired, and the lower their vitamin D level, the more likely they were to be in that group. Compared with those in the highest one-quarter for serum vitamin D, those in the lowest were 2.3 times as likely to be impaired, even after statistically adjusting for age, sex, education and ethnicity. Men showed the effect more strongly than women. “The cause of dementia is not vitamin D deficiency,” said David Llewellyn, a research associate at Cambridge University and the study’s lead author. “It’s a very complicated disease. But while further research is needed, vitamin D supplementation is cheap, safe and convenient, and may therefore play an important role in prevention.” According to background information in the study, which appears online in The Journal of Geriatric Psychology and Neurology, vitamin D receptors are present in a variety of cells, including neurons and the glial cells associated with them. That suggests that the vitamin may play a role in brain development and the protection of neurons. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12588 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Taking a combination of folic acid and B vitamins may help to prevent a common form of vision loss in older women, according to a new study. Age-related macular degeneration is a degenerative disease of the macula, a small area at the centre of the retina. The overgrowth of blood vessels into the retina can lead to central vision loss, preventing sufferers from seeing fine details, recognizing faces, or reading and driving. It is a leading cause of vision loss in older Americans, and more than a third of Canadians between the ages of 55 and 74 develop AMD, according to the AMD Canada website. In Monday's issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, William Christen, of Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, and his colleagues reported the results of their randomized double-blind clinical trial involving more than 5,000 women aged 40 and older. "Other than avoiding cigarette smoking, this is the first suggestion from a randomized trial of a possible way to reduce early stage AMD," said Christen, who led the research. The findings should also apply to men, he said. In the study, participants who took a combination of vitamin B6, vitamin B12 and folic acid reduced their risk of macular degeneration by more than a third after seven years, compared with women who took placebos. © CBC 2009

Keyword: Vision
Link ID: 12587 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Carrie Arnold The Griecos had learned of Christina's illness just months earlier, although she had been struggling with the eating disorder for three years. They found outpatient therapy for her right away, but it didn't stop her from slashing her calories to starvation levels. Feeling helpless and guilty, as if they were somehow to blame, the Griecos, who live in Chantilly, arranged for Christina to spend two months in an eating disorders clinic in Arizona, at a cost of more than $100,000. ad_icon In their haste, they forgot about a note that one therapist had scribbled on a scrap of paper: "Maudsley approach," it read. "Very effective for adolescents." Looking back, the Griecos wish they had focused on it sooner. Unlike traditional eating disorder treatment programs, which tend to equate parental involvement with parental interference, the Maudsley approach treats the family as an integral part of the healing process. Named for the London hospital where it was developed in the 1980s, the Maudsley approach views food as medicine and parents as the optimal people to help their child return to health. Unlike traditional psychotherapy, this family-based treatment views the ill teenager as unable to start eating, rather than as choosing not to eat. © 2009 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Anorexia & Bulimia
Link ID: 12586 - Posted: 06.24.2010

by Joyce Gramza Besides well-known complications like nerve damage, people with type 2 diabetes also have twice the normal risk of Alzheimer’s disease. In fact, some researchers even describe Alzheimer’s as a "type 3" diabetes. So Alzheimer’s researchers at San Diego’s Burnham Institute for Medical Research tested the effects of diabetes treatments on brain cells. They found that metformin, a drug commonly-prescribed to diabetics and prediabetics (those at risk of becoming diabetic), can more than double the production of amyloid-beta, or a-beta, the protein that forms toxic brain plaques in Alzheimer’s. Francesca Fang-Liao, Huaxi Xu and their team saw this increase in a-beta after treating brain cells in the lab with metformin. However, the effect was reversed when they added insulin. As they wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they also confirmed both findings in the brains of mice given metformin, or metformin plus insulin. "Based on the chemical structure of metformin, it doesn’t look to be able to cross the blood brain barrier," says Liao, who is now at the University of Tennessee School of Medicine. "However… when we gave metformin in the drinking water [of mice] we found that after one or two days it reached to the brain, accumulating there in significant concentrations. ©2009 ScienCentral

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 12585 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Jesse Bering Although I've always wanted this particular superhuman power, I've never been very good at detecting other men's sexual orientation. Findings from a recent study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, however, suggest I may be underestimating my gaydar abilities. The January 2008 study investigated people's ability to identify homosexual men from pictures of their faces alone. In an initial experiment, researchers Nicholas Rule and Nalini Ambady from Tufts University perused online dating sites and carefully selected 45 straight male faces and 45 gay male faces. All of these photos were matched for orientation (only faces shown looking forward were used) and facial alterations (none of the images contained jewelry, glasses or facial hair). To control for context, the faces were also cut and pasted onto a white background for the study. These 90 faces were then shown to 90 participants in random order, who were asked simply to judge the target's "probable sexual orientation" (gay or straight) by pressing a button. Surprisingly, all participants (both men and women) scored above chance on this gaydar task, correctly identifying the gay faces. Even more surprisingly, accuracy rate was just as good when the images were exposed at a rapid rate of only 50 milliseconds, which offered participants no opportunity to consciously process the photo. A parsimonious explanation for these findings would be that the countenance of these photos—an online dating site—means that they're likely stereotypical in some way. In other words, perhaps it's not the target's face per se that signals his sexual orientation, but the way he expresses himself facially when trying to attract a member of the same or the opposite gender. Or maybe hairstyles are suggestive of sexual orientation. Wary of these possible criticisms, Rule and Ambady conducted a second experiment that controlled for such extraneous variables as self-presentation and hairstyle. © 1996-2009 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 12584 - Posted: 06.24.2010