By Matt Kaplan Talk about "gaydar." In just a fraction of a second, people can accurately judge the sexual orientation of other individuals by glancing at their faces, according to new research. The finding builds on the growing theory that the subconscious mind detects and probably guides much more of human behavior than is realized. Humans are remarkably good at making snap judgments about others. In a hallmark study conducted by psychologists Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal in 1994, people shown 2-second video clips of professors teaching formed opinions about the professors' teaching abilities that were uncannily similar to evaluations written by students at the end of a semester. The results led psychologists to begin questioning what else people might detect in a glance. Ambady and colleague Nicholas Rule, both at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, wondered about sexual orientation. They showed men and women photos of 90 faces belonging to homosexual men and heterosexual men for intervals ranging from 33 milliseconds to 10 seconds. When given 100 milliseconds or more to view a face, participants correctly identified sexual orientation nearly 70% of the time. Volunteers were less accurate at shorter durations, and their accuracy did not get better at durations beyond 100 milliseconds, the team reports in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. "What is most interesting is that increased exposure time did not improve the results," says Ambady. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11223 - Posted: 06.24.2010

People with slightly longer legs really are more attractive to the opposite sex, a study suggests. Polish research found both men and women preferred a picture of a person in which the legs had been manipulated to be 5% longer than they really were. But extremely long legs did not fare as well, the study published in the New Scientist suggests. Legs that had been stretched to be 15% longer were apparently less of a turn-on than the original, normal pair. The original pair were seen as equally attractive as a pair that had been stretched by 10%. The researchers at the University of Wroclaw distorted seven pictures of men and women, who had varying leg lengths to start with. They showed the finished products to 218 volunteers of both sexes. "Long legs signal health," said Dr Boguslaw Pawlowski, who led the research. He added that he did not think Poles would be unusual in preferring the longer limbs. There is a growing body of research which links longer legs with better health. Most recently a UK study suggested that the shorter-legged may have an increased risk of liver disease, for instance. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 11222 - Posted: 01.18.2008

WASHINGTON - As many as 20 percent of U.S. combat troops who fought in Iraq or Afghanistan leave with signs they may have had a concussion, and some do not realize they need treatment, Army officials said Thursday. Concussion is a common term for mild traumatic brain injury, or TBI. While the Army has a handle on treating more severe brain injuries, it is "challenged to understand, diagnose and treat military personnel who suffer with mild TBI," said Brig. Gen. Donald Bradshaw, chairman of a task force on traumatic brain injury created by the Army surgeon general. The task force, which completed its work in May, released its findings on Thursday. It estimated that from 10 percent to 20 percent of soldiers and Marines from tactical units leaving Iraq and Afghanistan are affected by mild traumatic brain injury. The most common cause was blast from an explosion. The symptoms can include headaches, dizziness, nausea, light sensitivity, sleep problems, memory problems, confusion and irritability. With treatment, more than 80 of patients recover completely, the task force said. Less than half who suffered from a mild traumatic brain injury in combat have persistent symptoms associated with it, said Col. Robert Labutta, a neurosurgeon with the Army surgeon general's office. Copyright 2008 The Associated Press

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 11221 - Posted: 01.18.2008

When you’re in a crowd, do you notice the smiling faces or frowning faces? Social psychologist Mark Baldwin of McGill University in Canada says the answer might influence how much stress you’re under. “If your attention is drawn during the day towards social threats like rejections and criticisms, you’re filtering the world such that you’re going to see it as more stressful, more threatening, than someone who’s able to be aware of the acceptance and warm support around them,” says Baldwin. Baldwin and Stephane D. M. Dandeneau, along with other colleagues at McGill and Douglas Hospital Research Center, conducted a multi-part study to see, first, if people’s perception of social threat could influence stress hormone levels and then, if an experimental video game could help improve their well-being. Baldwin explains that the idea of a video game came from the realization that he and his students had all experienced being riveted by a certain classic: “We were looking for a way to help people train automatic habitual patterns of thought, and my students and I were talking about this one day and we thought about computer games because if you’ve ever played the game Tetris for hours and hours and hours, you start thinking about it when you’re not trying to. You even dream about it. You start reorganizing your closet for no apparent reason. “And so we thought, okay, can we design a game to use this same kind of interactivity, these repetitive thought processes, to help people train positive, helpful thought processes?” © ScienCentral, 2000-2008.

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 11220 - Posted: 06.24.2010

David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor Consider the remarkable strategy of a lowly parasitic worm in the tropics that seeks to spread its progeny far and wide: The tiny worm infects a tropical ant, and turns its black belly red. The ant waves its belly up high, and it looks just like a ripe, red berry. A bird gobbles up what it thinks is a berry; it flies away and its droppings fall to the ground. From those droppings come thousands of the parasite's eggs, and behold! They hatch and a new population of nematode worms emerges, ready to infect more ants that turn more ant bellies red that attract more birds to eat the red bellies, and so on and on and on. The parasite is a species of nematode also known as roundworms, the ant is called Cephalotes atratus and it lives high in the canopy of tropical rainforests from Peru to Panama, while just any old bird will do in this bizarre example of co-evolution that has brought all three - the worm, the ant and the bird - together. The birds don't normally eat the black ants because they're heavily armored and taste bad, but red ant bellies that look like berries are apparently an irresistible morsel. © 2008 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 11219 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Artificially intelligent Dr. Doolittles can understand dog barks as well or better than humans do. These findings suggest computers might significantly help people comprehend animal communication. Scientists tested artificially intelligent software on more than 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian sheepdogs. Six different kinds of barks were taped: Barks for strangers were recorded when a researcher approached a dog's owner's home when the owner was away. Barks during fights were recorded at dog training schools, when a trainer encouraged dogs to bite the glove on the trainer's arms and bark aggressively. Barks for walks were recorded when owners behaved as if they were preparing to go for a walk with their dogs. Barks for balls were recorded when owners held balls in front of dogs. Barks during playtime were recorded when owners played tug-of-war or similar games with dogs. Barks made when alone were recorded when owners tied dogs to trees in a park and then walked out of sight. © 2008 LiveScience.com.

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 11218 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By BENEDICT CAREY The makers of antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil never published the results of about a third of the drug trials that they conducted to win government approval, misleading doctors and consumers about the drugs’ true effectiveness, a new analysis has found. In published trials, about 60 percent of people taking the drugs report significant relief from depression, compared with roughly 40 percent of those on placebo pills. But when the less positive, unpublished trials are included, the advantage shrinks: the drugs outperform placebos, but by a modest margin, concludes the new report, which appears Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine. Previous research had found a similar bias toward reporting positive results for a variety of medications; and many researchers have questioned the reported effectiveness of antidepressants. But the new analysis, reviewing data from 74 trials involving 12 drugs, is the most thorough to date. And it documents a large difference: while 94 percent of the positive studies found their way into print, just 14 percent of those with disappointing or uncertain results did. The finding is likely to inflame a continuing debate about how drug trial data is reported. In 2004, after revelations that negative findings from antidepressant trials had not been published, a group of leading journals agreed to stop publishing clinical trials that were not registered in a public database. Trade groups representing the world’s largest drug makers announced that members’ companies would begin to release more data from trials more quickly, on their own database, clinicalstudyresults.org. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 11217 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nikhil Swaminathan Ask Michael Wigler about the genetic basis of autism, and he will tell you that the standard genetic methods of tracing disease-causing mutations in families with multiple affected members are not working. Although most scientists agree that environmental influences play a role in disease onset, autism has a strong genetic component: among identical twins, if one is autistic, there is a 70 percent chance the other will show the disease, a risk factor nearly 10 times that observed in fraternal twins and regular siblings. Yet years of time and bags of money have been spent unsuccessfully looking for genes linked to the condition. To Wigler, a geneticist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, the key to unlocking autism’s genetic mystery lies in spontaneous mutations—alterations in the parental germ line that are novel in offspring. Last year he proved that spontaneous events contribute to some cases of au­­tism and then formed a controversial theory for the genetics of the disorder. It suggests, among other things, that females, who develop autism with a quarter of the frequency with which males do, may carry the genetic profile for the illness, which they then pass on to their children. As Wigler sees it, conventional genetic studies have failed because they have corralled families that have more than one autistic child to search for differences in one base along the genetic code. These differences, which are presumed to affect neural connectivity, can be an addition, a deletion or a substitution of a base and are known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). In autism research, uncovering SNPs shared by affected people would enable scientists to determine who would have an elevated risk for acquiring the disease or passing it on. © 1996-2007 Scientific American Inc.

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11216 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Kerri Smith A drug has been found that treats chronic pain in mice, without the usual painkiller side effects of sedation, addiction or developing tolerance. Whether the compound has the same effect in people remains to be seen, but researchers are approaching the drug's target with "cautious optimism". The compound comes from a well-known class of drugs, the benzodiazepines, that are widely used for sedation or to treat anxiety. Benzodiazepines act on brain pathways involved with pain perception, but have not been very effective at relieving pain. A team led by Hanns Ulrich Zeilhofer of the University of Zurich in Switzerland wanted to know why. They first tested diazepam — commonly known as valium — by injecting it into the spines of mice. The spine is one of the body's direct pain highways, so blocking pain signals here might help avoid side effects that turn up when a drug hits the brain. In this system the researchers found that diazepam could indeed relieve pain — mice that either endured a painful injection or had a nerve squeezed to simulate chronic pain were less bothered if they received the spinal injections. © 2008 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11215 - Posted: 06.24.2010

These days, it’s tough to know what to worry about. Resistant bacteria? Cancer? Global warming? As it turns out, you’re not going to get any extra help from your brain. Although the human brain is well adapted to respond to risk, it’s not so skilled at sorting out which modern risks to worry about. The current issue of Psychology Today explains why in its article “10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong.'’ “Our biases reflect the choices that kept our ancestors alive. But we have yet to evolve similarly effective responses to statistics, media coverage, and fear-mongering politicians….Though emotions are themselves critical to making rational decisions, they were designed for a world in which dangers took the form of predators, not pollutants.” Part of the problem is that our emotions have evolved to help our brains make “lightning fast” assessments about risk before we have a chance to think. Things that have been around awhile — snakes and spiders, for instance, scare us. But bigger risks, such as fast driving, don’t trigger the same instinctive response. “Our emotions push us to make snap judgments that once were sensible — but may not be anymore,'’ the author, Maia Szalavitz, writes. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11214 - Posted: 06.24.2010

NEW YORK - Some elderly adults may be more susceptible to fraud because of changes in their brain that affect judgment and decision-making, researchers said on Tuesday. In a series of tests they tried to identify common traits among seniors who had difficulty making decisions and spotting anything misleading to determine what makes them vulnerable to deception. "Our research suggests that elders who fall prey to fraudulent advertising are not simply gullible, depressed, lonely or less intelligent. Rather, it is truly more of a medical or neurological problem," said Natalie Denburg, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa. "Our work sheds new light on this problem and perhaps may lead to a way to identify people at risk of being deceived," she added in a statement. Denburg and her colleagues studied 80 healthy seniors with no apparent neurological problems to see how they make decisions. Their findings were published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. Copyright 2008 Reuters.

Keyword: Alzheimers
Link ID: 11213 - Posted: 01.17.2008

By JAN HOFFMAN WEST ORANGE, N.J. — In the therapy gym for the minimally functional, Jodi Levin props a patient between cushions, kneels behind him and then braces him with her arms. She directs his mother to select photos of his brother and his father. At the coaxing of Ms. Levin, an occupational therapist on the brain injury unit of Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation, the mother holds one photo to the left side of the patient’s head, the other to the right. “Look at Dad’s picture,” Ms. Levin urges. “Dad’s on the left. Find Dad. You can do it!” The patient, wobbly and glazed, tries mightily to understand her command and then heed it by compelling his neck to turn. He almost makes it. Gently letting him go, catching him as he flops, Ms. Levin explains to his mother, “Now I’m working on trunk control.” The man flinches. “It’s the basis of everything,” she continues. “For getting in and out of bed, brushing teeth, getting dressed.” Eight weeks earlier, the patient, 18, wearing a helmet and protective leather gear, had been riding his motorcycle to community college. As he came over a hill, the car in front slowed abruptly; to avoid hitting it, the teenager swerved and was hit by an oncoming car. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion
Link ID: 11212 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Aggressive behaviour is very rewarding from a cognitive perspective, with the brain interpreting it as a pleasurable activity on par with sex or recreational drugs, a new mouse study suggests. "It is well known that dopamine is produced in response to rewarding stimuli such as food, sex and drugs of abuse," Maria Couppis, who conducted the study as her doctoral thesis at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, said in a release. "What we have now found is that it also serves as positive reinforcement for aggression." Dopamine is a hormone-like substance that acts as neurotransmitter — translating the effects of things like drugs into sensations. The study of mice involved placing a female and male mouse in a cage, with five other mice in a separate enclosure. In the course of the experiment, the female mouse would be removed from the cage and temporarily replaced with an "intruder" mouse. The aggressiveness of the male mouse was then observed. Over time, the male mouse, trained to poke a target with its nose if it wanted the intruder to arrive again, increasingly signalled it wanted the other mouse to return and that it perceived the encounter as a reward. © CBC 2008

Keyword: Aggression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 11211 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By SANDRA BLAKESLEE On Thursday, the 12-pound, 32-inch monkey made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity. She was in North Carolina, and the robot was in Japan. It was the first time that brain signals had been used to make a robot walk, said Dr. Miguel A. L. Nicolelis, a neuroscientist at Duke University whose laboratory designed and carried out the experiment. In 2003, Dr. Nicolelis’s team proved that monkeys could use their thoughts alone to control a robotic arm for reaching and grasping. These experiments, Dr. Nicolelis said, are the first steps toward a brain machine interface that might permit paralyzed people to walk by directing devices with their thoughts. Electrodes in the person’s brain would send signals to a device worn on the hip, like a cell phone or pager, that would relay those signals to a pair of braces, a kind of external skeleton, worn on the legs. “When that person thinks about walking,” he said, “walking happens.” Richard A. Andersen, an expert on such systems at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who was not involved in the experiment, said that it was “an important advance to achieve locomotion with a brain machine interface.” Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Robotics
Link ID: 11210 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Sandra G. Boodman One of the most horrifying medical treatments of the 20th century was carried out not clandestinely, but with the approval of the medical establishment, the media and the public. Known as the transorbital or "ice pick" lobotomy, the crude and destructive brain-scrambling operation performed on thousands of psychiatric patients between the 1930s and 1960s was touted as a cure for mental illness. The story of how Freeman sold his procedure to credulous colleagues, assiduously courted the press and convinced desperate families that sticking an ice pick through a patient's upper eye sockets and twirling it like a swizzle stick through brain matter would cure psychosis, depression or troublesome behavior is the ultimate in cautionary medical tales. As the riveting hour-long "American Experience" documentary "The Lobotomist" (scheduled to air Jan. 21 at 9 p.m. on WETA and other PBS stations) makes clear, Freeman's operation reflected the neurologist's peculiar combination of zealotry, talent, hubris and, as one of his trainees noted, craziness. Sometimes Freeman, who relished putting on a show, used a carpenter's mallet instead of a surgical hammer during demonstrations of his operation. At other times, he would operate left-handed rather than right-handed. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Depression
Link ID: 11209 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By LAURA BLUE It's no secret that men with angry, explosive personalities are at a higher risk of a heart attack. But they're not alone: Nervous, withdrawn and chronically worried people are courting coronary problems, too, according to a new long-term study in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. Of 735 American middle-aged or elderly men who had good cardiovascular health in 1986, those who scored highest on four different scales of anxiety were far more likely to suffer heart attacks later in life. Men in the top 15% on any of the four scales, or on a combined scale of all four, had a 30% to 40% greater chance of heart attack than their less anxious peers. Researchers have long known that problems of the mind can affect health. Other studies have looked at the relationships between heart-attack risk and factors like "Type A" personality, anger or depression. But "very few studies look at many psychological factors at one time," says Biing-Jiun Shen, lead author on the anxiety paper and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Southern California. "I think that's a unique part of this study." Using data from the U.S. Normative Aging Study, Shen reviewed the men's responses to a series of questions on the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (a commonly administered personality test), and pulled out their scores on four separate anxiety scales that measured obsessive or compulsive thoughts; introversion and social exclusion; phobias; and a predisposition to become tense or have a physical reaction, like nausea or hyperventilation, to stressful situations. © 2008 Time Inc

Keyword: Stress
Link ID: 11208 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee When diners order an expensive wine from a restaurant menu, they usually find that it tastes exquisite, harmonious, elegant--in short, much better than the $8 Cabernet they drink at home. A new study suggests that the high price tag could be fooling them into feeling that way by manipulating the brain's pleasure centers. Previous studies have shown that savvy marketing can change how we feel about a product. For example, branding a perfume as classy somehow makes it smell more appealing. Curious about how such marketing affects the brain, researchers led by Antonio Rangel, an economist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, and Baba Shiv, a marketing professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of 20 volunteers as they sipped what they thought were five kinds of Cabernet Sauvignon. In reality, the researchers gave the subjects three wines with retail prices of $5, $35, and $90. The cheapest wine was served twice but disguised in one of the servings as a different label costing $45. The $90 vintage also made two appearances, once with its real price and once with a price of $10. The faux marketing worked. Volunteers reported liking the cheap wine better when it had a higher price attached to it and the expensive wine less when it was marked cheaper. What's more, when sipping wines tagged with a higher price, the volunteers showed greater activity in their medial orbitofrontal cortex--a part of the brain believed to be responsible for judging pleasantness of experiences--than when they sipped the cheaply marked wines. The findings, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that marketing actions such as pricing can have a placebo effect on the brain in the same way that dummy pills have been shown to relieve pain. © 2008 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions
Link ID: 11207 - Posted: 06.24.2010

It is no easy task to get rid of an itch but scientists say the answer may be in your genes. Researchers have discovered a defective skin gene in people with an inherited skin disorder, which causes itching, especially on the legs. The findings may provide insights into other kinds of itch and could lead to new treatments. Writing in the American Journal of Human Genetics, the team said experts do not really know what causes itching. Chronic itching can be caused by skin disorders like eczema or can stem from deeper problems such as kidney failure or liver disease. It can also be a serious side-effect of cancer therapies or powerful painkillers like morphine and in severe cases leads to sleep problems and scarring. Although itchy skin is one of the most common problems seen by dermatologists, there are few effective therapies. Professor John McGrath, from King's College London, studied a large Brazilian family who suffered from a condition called primary localised cutaneous amyloidosis (PLCA). It affects several thousand people in the UK but is more common in other parts of the world including South America. He found that the disorder was caused by a defective copy of a skin cell gene called oncostatin M receptor-beta (OSMR). Cells with mutant forms of the gene do not respond properly to signalling molecules which prompt an anti-inflammatory response. Normally, itchiness would be prevented by the anti-inflammatory process. (C)BBC

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 11206 - Posted: 01.14.2008

By ALEX BERENSON Fibromyalgia is a real disease. Or so says Pfizer in a new television advertising campaign for Lyrica, the first medicine approved to treat the pain condition, whose very existence is questioned by some doctors. For patient advocacy groups and doctors who specialize in fibromyalgia, the Lyrica approval is a milestone. They say they hope Lyrica and two other drugs that may be approved this year will legitimize fibromyalgia, just as Prozac brought depression into the mainstream. But other doctors — including the one who wrote the 1990 paper that defined fibromyalgia but who has since changed his mind — say that the disease does not exist and that Lyrica and the other drugs will be taken by millions of people who do not need them. As diagnosed, fibromyalgia primarily affects middle-aged women and is characterized by chronic, widespread pain of unknown origin. Many of its sufferers are afflicted by other similarly nebulous conditions, like irritable bowel syndrome. Because fibromyalgia patients typically do not respond to conventional painkillers like aspirin, drug makers are focusing on medicines like Lyrica that affect the brain and the perception of pain. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11205 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Nick Miroff The crowd is gathering early in the dirt parking lot outside the Clinch Valley Treatment Center, the only methadone clinic within 80 miles. Third in line, Jeff Trapp smokes Winstons in his pickup, watching the cars turn off the highway and settle behind him, tires crunching on cold gravel, headlights glaring. It is 2:45 a.m., and Trapp has been awake for two hours. The clinic does not start dosing until 5. Like Trapp, many of the patients who filled the lot one recent morning have jobs at far-off mines that start at 6 or 7. They sleep upright in their vehicles, slumped against the steering wheel, dressed for work in steel-toed black boots and coveralls lined with orange reflective strips. Dark rings circle their eyes where the previous day's coal dust didn't wash off. "Everybody you see here works," says Trapp, his smoke-cured voice a low rumble. A $14 plug-in heater from "Wally" (Wal-Mart) whirs on the dash. "Ain't no spongers. No loafers," he says. Work in the mines hasn't been as good as it is now in a generation. With per-ton prices doubling in the past six years, Virginia unearthed about $1.6 billion worth of coal in 2006, much of it to feed the growing energy demands of the Washington region. © 2008 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Pain & Touch
Link ID: 11204 - Posted: 06.24.2010