By Christopher Mims It's commonly assumed that testosterone, that stereotypically male hormone, is intimately tied to violence. The evidence is all around us: weight lifters who overdose on anabolic steroids experience "roid rage," and castration—the removal of the source of testosterone—has been a staple of animal husbandry for centuries. But what is the nature of that relationship? If you give a normal man a shot of testosterone, will he turn into the Incredible Hulk? And do violent men have higher levels of testosterone than their more docile peers? "[Historically,] researchers expected an increase in testosterone levels to inevitably lead to more aggression, and this didn't reliably occur," says Frank McAndrew, a professor of psychology at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. Indeed, the latest research about testosterone and aggression indicates that there's only a weak connection between the two. And when aggression is more narrowly defined as simple physical violence, the connection all but disappears. "What psychologists and psychiatrists say is that testosterone has a facilitative effect on aggression," comments Melvin Konner, an anthropologist at Emory University and author of The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit. "You don't have a push-pull, click-click relationship where you inject testosterone and get aggressiveness." Castration experiments demonstrate that testosterone is necessary for violence, but other research has shown that testosterone is not, on its own, sufficient. In this way, testosterone is less a perpetrator and more an accomplice—one that's sometimes not too far from the scene of the crime. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc

Keyword: Aggression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 10467 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Erin Allday, Chronicle Staff Writer Men, it turns out, talk just as much as women. Sure, maybe guys talk more about cars and sports and the new iPhone, and women talk about their feelings, but at the end of the day, each sex uses an average 16,000 words a day, say researchers who studied the conversational habits of 396 men and women for six years. "I was a little surprised there wasn't any gender influence, because this stereotype of women talking more is such a powerful, popular idea," said Richard Slatcher, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Texas and one of the authors of the study. "But we were able to directly test the notion, and it's totally unfounded." The study, results of which were published today in the journal Science, debunks an age-old assumption that women aren't just the fairer sex, they're the chattier one, too. Tony Bennett sang about it in "Girl Talk" in the 1960s: "The weaker sex, the 'speaker' sex we mortal males behold, but though we joke, we wouldn't trade you for a ton of gold." The stereotype is so pervasive that even scientists have long assumed that women talk more, and they incorporated that assumption in psychological gender profiles. When UCSF psychiatrist Louann Brizendine published "The Female Brain" last year, one statistic in particular jumped off the pages and became the main talking point among radio-show hosts and Internet bloggers -- women, Brizendine wrote, use an average of 20,000 words a day; men use only 7,000. © 2007 Hearst Communications Inc.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Language
Link ID: 10466 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Janet Raloff Betty (not her real name) remembers the day 9 years ago when she fully experienced an orange. As she split the fruit's skin, the sections, citrus scents sprayed into the air and the 51-year-old woman experienced a sensory epiphany: "Whoa! This is an orange. My God, this is what an orange smells like." Even now, she says, recalling that day "makes me tear up because that orange was the very first thing I smelled." Ever. "There are probably around 25 million people in this country who have some olfactory problem," observes Barry Davis, who directs the taste and smell program at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Md. Few people lack all sense of smell. Among these, Davis notes, only a tiny share were either born that way, as Betty was, or lost olfaction so early that they can't recall being able to smell. More common is a gradual diminution of olfaction among seniors, notes Beverly J. Cowart, a sensory psychologist at the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia. By age 70, she says, "some degree of smell loss will be close to universal." Smell loss can also follow head trauma, arise as a complication of respiratory or brain disease, or signal pollutant poisoning of nasal cells. ©2007 Science Service.

Keyword: Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 10465 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Bruce Bower There's more to the intelligence of autistic people than meets the IQ. Unlike most individuals, children and adults diagnosed as autistic often score much higher on a challenging, nonverbal test of abstract reasoning than they do on a standard IQ test, say psychologist Laurent Mottron of Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies in Montreal and his colleagues. The same autistic individuals who score near or below the IQ cutoff for "low functioning" or "mental retardation" achieve average or even superior scores on a test that taps a person's ability to infer rules and to think abstractly about geometric patterns, Mottron's team reports in the August Psychological Science. "Intelligence has been underestimated in autistics," Mottron says. Autistic people solve problems and deploy neural resources in unusual ways, which are poorly understood and might contribute to problems with IQ tests, he asserts. Mottron regards autism as a variant of healthy neural development. For that reason, his group—including study coauthor Michelle Dawson, herself diagnosed as autistic—prefers the term "autistic" to "person with autism." The researchers studied 38 autistic children, ages 7 to 16; 13 autistic adults, ages 16 to 43; 24 nonautistic children, ages 6 to 16; and 19 nonautistic adults, ages 19 to 32. ©2007 Science Service.

Keyword: Autism; Intelligence
Link ID: 10464 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Philip Ball A potential new drug for treatment of bipolar disorder (sometimes called manic depression) is being designed by researchers in Chicago and New York. The team hopes that their compound, which works as well in mice as do the currently prescribed drugs, will ultimately provide relief without the side-effects of present treatments. Bipolar disorder, which afflicts about 1% of adults, is typically treated with drugs called mood stabilizers, especially lithium and a compound called valproic acid. These medications can have unpleasant side effects, such as weight gain and excessive thirst, making it important to find alternatives. But although these drugs were discovered decades ago, nothing better has yet emerged. Mood stabilizers such as lithium are thought to act by blocking the function of an enzyme called glycogen synthase kinase-3 (GSK-3) in the brain. Researchers have found other substances that can block GSK-3 elsewhere in the body for treatment of other conditions, but these can't combat bipolar disorder because they don't get into the brain. Alan Kozikowski of the University of Illinois in Chicago and his co-workers took a directed, rational approach to searching out a new drug candidate. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 10463 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Yawning may appear the height of rudeness, but in fact your body is desperately trying to keep you awake, according to research from the US. Psychologists who studied 44 students concluded that yawning sent cooler air to the brain, helping it to stay alert. Yawning therefore delays sleep rather than promotes it, the study in Evolutionary Psychology suggested. The desire to yawn when others do so may also be a mechanism to help a group stay alert in the face of danger. The common wisdom is that people yawn because they need oxygen, but the researchers at the University of Albany in New York said their experiments showed that raising or lowering oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the blood did not produce that reaction. Their evidence suggested instead that drawing in air helps cool the brain and helps it work more effectively. In a study of the 44 students, researchers found that those who breathed through the nose rather than the mouth were less likely to yawn when watching a video of other people yawning. This was because vessels in the nasal cavity sent cool blood to the brain, they said. (C)BBC

Keyword: Sleep; Attention
Link ID: 10462 - Posted: 07.06.2007

By LIBBY SANDER CHICAGO, — Frustrated with the federal government’s response to the mental health needs of soldiers, Illinois officials announced on Tuesday that members of the state’s National Guard would be routinely screened for traumatic brain injuries after serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. The mandatory program, which appears to be the first in the nation, will also offer the screening to other veterans in the state and will include a 24-hour hot line providing psychological counseling to veterans of all military branches. The program is expected to cost $10.5 million a year. “It’s been shown that the federal government simply was not prepared to deal with the number of war injured coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Tammy Duckworth, the director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs and a former Blackhawk helicopter pilot who lost both legs on active duty in Iraq. “This is a way that we in Illinois can react much more quickly,” Ms. Duckworth said at a news conference with Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, a Democrat. There are currently 1,100 members of the Illinois Army National Guard serving, or preparing to serve, in Iraq or Afghanistan. Traumatic brain injuries afflict 14 percent to 20 percent of military service members, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, a federally financed program. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Brain Injury/Concussion; Brain imaging
Link ID: 10461 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists are perfecting a test which they hope will confirm mad cow disease (vCJD) in humans. At present doctors test for the presence of abnormal proteins called prions which are thought to cause the disease by killing off brain cells. But this can only be definitively done at post mortem by examining the brain. An Edinburgh University team has found a way to boost prion numbers to confirm a diagnosis. Their work features in the Journal of Pathology. The technique, known as protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA), works by by mimicking and accelerating the replication of prions so they are more easily detected in test samples. It has so far been tested mainly in animal models. But the Edinburgh team has shown for the first time that it is possible to use the technique to amplify the number of vCJD prions in infected human brain tissue extracts by using normal blood cells (platelets) to drive the reaction. The sample is incubated with platelets and exposed to repeated rounds of ultrasound, which break the prions up into more numerous smaller particles. Further research is needed to establish whether the technique can be applied to other tissues, such as blood, that might be used in tests for vCJD. Professor James Ironside, of Edinburgh University's National CJD Surveillance Unit, said the test took too long to carry out to be used to obtain a rapid diagnosis in a blood donation centre. (C)BBC

Keyword: Prions
Link ID: 10460 - Posted: 07.06.2007

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. Briefly: Who talks more? Man? Woman? Who Talks More? Conventional wisdom: women use 20,000 words a day, men 7,000. Come cocktail hour, hubby played out. Wife frustrated: 13,000 words to go, no takers. Bad for sex. But wisdom comes from populist 2006 book “The Female Brain.” Data shaky. Skeptics abound. Today, study published Science magazine: 396 subjects wear tiny microphones. Result: whoops. Women emit 16,125 words per day, men 15,669. Statistically, even-steven. But authors admit flaw: all 396 were college students — congenitally loquacious, no jobs, no commutes, no need for aphonic mesmerization by Monday Night Football. Despite flaw, says lead author, Matthias R. Mehl, University of Arizona psychologist, “Our paper puts to rest the idea that the female brain evolved to be talkative and the male brain evolved to be reticent.” But fact slyly not mentioned in Science study: after first printing of “Female Brain,” author, Louann Brizendine, began worrying that 20,000 vs. 7,000 figure was just invented by marriage counselors and removed it. Thirteen printings in 21 languages later, myth clings on anyway. Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Language
Link ID: 10459 - Posted: 06.24.2010

From The Economist print edition FROM an evolutionary perspective, monogamy looks good for females and bad for males. For mothers, it means devotion as dad is going to be around to help look after the kids. For fathers it is more of a prison sentence, because it restricts a male's ability to inseminate lots of females at relatively low cost. In most circumstances, unless the young are likely to die without paternal support, a male has little incentive to stay with an individual female when he has so many other females to breed with. That, at least, was the conventional wisdom until fairly recently. But modern genetic techniques have shown that in many species females in apparently monogamous relationships often produce families that have more than one father. To explain this, biologists have theorised that these females are mating with males who are genetically superior to their regular mates, thus getting the benefit of parental assistance from a cuckold and good genes from a Lothario. Proving that, though, is a lengthy process. And it is only now that Aurélie Cohas and her colleagues at the University of Lyon, in France, seem to have done so. Their paper in July's edition of the Journal of Animal Ecology shows that for marmots, at least, a bit on the side can help a female's evolutionary chances no end. © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2007

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 10458 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Constance Holden "Women's tongues are like lambs' tails--they are never still." --Old English saying From old adages to modern pop psychology, the notion that women yak more than men is pervasive. But according to a new study, the biggest to date, the two sexes are in fact pretty much neck and neck. Girls have a jump on boys in verbal fluency early in life, but research is confusing on the subject of whether they actually talk more than boys do as adults. One oft-cited statistic, whose origins are shrouded in the mists of time, has it that the average woman utters 20,000 words a day, compared to only 7000 issuing from the laconic male. But until now, there has been "no large-scale study that systematically has recorded the natural conversations of large groups of people for [an] extended period of time,” says psychologist James Pennebaker of the University of Texas at Austin. To remedy that, Pennebaker, along with Arizona psychologist Matthias Mehl and other colleagues equipped 396 college students--210 of them women--for several days with voice recorders that automatically turned on every 12.5 minutes to record for 30 seconds during their waking hours. All words spoken by the wearer were transcribed, counted, and extrapolated to estimate a daily word count. Pennebaker says the findings, appearing in today's issue of Science, should put the myths to rest: Both men and women averaged roughly 16,000 words a day. And there was no appreciable international difference either, at least in North America. U.S. students had about the same average as a sample of 51 students in Mexico. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Language
Link ID: 10457 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Krista Zala Rats given a helping paw are more prone to helping others--even complete strangers. This suggests that the animals' social life may be richer than we thought, according to the researchers whose new study revealed this rodent altruism. Many animals, including rats, demonstrate direct reciprocity--described as "I'll help you if you help me." But generalized reciprocity, in which individuals remember how they were treated in the recent past and apply it to others, including strangers, was thought to be a uniquely human trait, explains behavioral ecologist Claudia Rutte at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. However, she notes, previous studies haven't specifically looked for generalized reciprocity in other animals. To find out if rats have this capacity, Rutte and Michael Taborsky of the University of Bern in Switzerland trained rats to pull a lever that would deliver an oat flake reward to another rat on the other side of a wire mesh wall in a shared cage. Some of these rats were then put on the receiving side, paired for several days with either other rats trained to be helpful—-three different ones over the span--or with untrained rats that didn't pull the lever and provide food. After several days of living with such generous or not-so-generous neighbors, these test rats were then switched back to the lever side of the cage, paired with a new neighbor rat, and watched to see if they would provide food for it. Rats who had been paired with food-providing neighbors helped their new partner more often than those who had had unhelpful neighbors, the researchers report online this week in Public Library of Science Biology. Rutte's team also found that when a test rat was paired with one of the rats that had earlier provided it with oak flakes, it pulled the food lever even more--showing direct reciprocity. When the cage was empty of any neighbor rat, it barely pulled the food lever at all. © 2007 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 10456 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Just as the Bee Gees' disco style sounds antique compared to hip-hop, birdsong can also go out of fashion. Such stylistic changes may help explain how mating barriers arise, eventually leading to new species. Behavioural ecologists have long known that some songbirds develop local dialects, and that individual birds respond more strongly to their own dialect than to a foreign one. Less is known about how, or how quickly, such differences arise. To study how a dialect changes over time, Elizabeth Derryberry, a behavioural ecologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, compared recordings of male white-crowned sparrows' song from 1979 - when the Bee Gees topped the charts - and 2003. The modern song, she found, was slower and lower in pitch. This difference mattered to the birds. When Derryberry played the songs to 10 female and 20 male birds, she found that females solicit more copulations and males showed more aggressive territorial behaviour to the contemporary song than to the older ones - even though the recordings were of equal quality and no bird had ever met any of the recorded individuals (Evolution, DOI: 10.1111/j.1558-5646.2007.00154.x). The result shows that meaningful differences in song styles can arise within just a few years, and thus that mating barriers can be erected quickly, says Derryberry. From issue 2611 of New Scientist magazine, 05 July 2007, page 17 © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 10455 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Louis Buckley Orang-utans can solve a brain-teaser that would vex many human minds, researchers have found. Faced with a vertical transparent tube, a quarter filled with water, in which a peanut floats tantalizingly beyond reach, what should you do? Five orang-utans from Leipzig Zoo in Germany all came to the same conclusion. Taking mouthfuls of water from a nearby bottle, they spat into the tube until the peanut floated into reach. The apes' ingenuity amazed the study's leader, Natacha Mendes from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. "Before we started we thought this was really complicated," she says. "If you asked someone in an office to solve this problem many people wouldn't be able to give a quick answer, and some probably wouldn't be able to figure it out at all." What made the task especially challenging is that the water was concealed inside a drinker, like a hamster's water bottle, and was some distance from the tube. This suggests that the orang-utans had to think at a more abstract level, says Mendes. "They have to have a mental image of the water in order to solve the problem." The results are reported in Biology Letters1. ©2007 Nature Publishing Group |

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 10454 - Posted: 06.24.2010

(AP) Difficulty identifying common smells such as lemon, banana and cinnamon may be the first sign of Alzheimer's disease, according to a study that could lead to scratch-and-sniff tests to determine a person's risk for the progressive brain disorder. Such tests could be important if scientists find ways to slow or stop Alzheimer's and the severe memory loss associated with it. For now, there's no cure for the more than 5 million Americans with the disease. Researchers have long known that microscopic lesions considered the hallmarks of Alzheimer's first appear in a brain region important to the sense of smell. "Strictly on the basis of anatomy, yeah, this makes sense," said Robert Franks, an expert on odor perception and the brain at the University of Cincinnati. Franks was not involved in the new study, appearing in Monday's Archives of General Psychiatry. Other studies have linked loss of smell to Alzheimer's, Franks said, but this is the first to measure healthy people's olfactory powers and follow them for five years, testing along the way for signs of mental decline. In the study, 600 people between the ages of 54 and 100 were asked to identify a dozen familiar smells: onion, lemon, cinnamon, black pepper, chocolate, rose, banana, pineapple, soap, paint thinner, gasoline and smoke. © MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc

Keyword: Alzheimers; Chemical Senses (Smell & Taste)
Link ID: 10453 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Scientists believe they have found a way to dampen down the impact of bad memories in people's brains. A US and Canadian team used a drug called propranolol to target unwanted memories, while leaving others intact. They injected the drug, which is more often used to treat heart patients, while a volunteer was asked to recall a painful memory. The Journal of Psychiatric Research study found that this seemed to disrupt the way the memory was then stored. The researchers, from McGill University, in Montreal, and Harvard University in Boston, hope their work could lead to new treatments for patients with psychiatric disorders, such as post-traumatic stress. However, others have warned the research is still at a very early stage - and expressed concern that it could potentially easily be abused. The researchers treated 19 crash or rape victims for 10 days with a drug, or a placebo. The volunteers were asked to recall their memories of a traumatic event that had happened 10 years earlier. A week later the researchers found that those people who were given a shot of propranolol showed fewer signs of stress such as raised heart rate when recalling their trauma. The researchers believe that memories are initially stored in the brain in a malleable, fluid state before becoming hard-wired into the circuitry. Then, when they are recalled, they once again become fluid - and capable of being altered. They believe propranolol disrupts the biochemical pathways that allow a memory to "harden" after it has been recalled. In a separate study, a New York University team said they had successfully erased a single memory from the brains of rats while leaving the rest of their memory intact. Dr Monica Thompson, a consultant clinical psychologist at London's Traumatic Stress Clinic, stressed that post traumatic stress disorder was a complex condition with many other symptoms other than bad memories. (C)BBC

Keyword: Learning & Memory
Link ID: 10452 - Posted: 07.03.2007

By Joanne Kenen David Thibault grows orchids as a hobby, but the elegant flower on his bedside tray did little to lift his spirits. He stared out the window of his room at George Washington University Hospital, waiting for lab results that could tell him if he had months, weeks or maybe only days to live. A month earlier, in April, Thibault and his wife, Judy Thibault Klevins, had been preparing for a trip to Japan when he felt pain that was different from the pain he had long experienced from Crohn's disease, an inflammatory bowel ailment. It turned out to be small-bowel cancer. If the disease weren't so rare, he now ventured aloud, maybe more research money would have gone into it, maybe he wouldn't be facing death at age 67. Joan Panke, a nurse practitioner, listened intently. The coordinator of GW's Palliative Care Service, Panke and her team ease the pain of those with serious or terminal illness. They walk families like the Thibaults through the difficult work of understanding options, making decisions and, sometimes, trying to find a measure of peace as they say goodbye. About a third of U.S. hospitals now offer some form of palliative care, which adapts aspects of the hospice philosophy without requiring patients to forgo curative care or to have a life expectancy of six months or less. Late last year the American Board of Medical Specialties recognized palliative medicine as a specialized field -- a move that will expand training, said Cameron Muir, a palliative care physician at Capital Hospice, the Washington area's largest hospice organization, and the president of the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine, based in Glenview, Ill. © 2007 The Washington Post Company

Keyword: Pain & Touch
Link ID: 10451 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By Coco Ballantyne Liquid H2O is the sine qua non of life. Making up about 66 percent of the human body, water runs through the blood, inhabits the cells, and lurks in the spaces between. At every moment water escapes the body through sweat, urination, defecation or exhaled breath, among other routes. Replacing these lost stores is essential but rehydration can be overdone. There is such a thing as a fatal water overdose. Earlier this year, a 28-year-old California woman died after competing in a radio station's on-air water-drinking contest. After downing some six liters of water in three hours in the "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" (Nintendo game console) contest, Jennifer Strange vomited, went home with a splitting headache, and died from so-called water intoxication. There are many other tragic examples of death by water. In 2005 a fraternity hazing at California State University, Chico, left a 21-year-old man dead after he was forced to drink excessive amounts of water between rounds of push-ups in a cold basement. Club-goers taking MDMA ("ecstasy") have died after consuming copious amounts of water trying to rehydrate following long nights of dancing and sweating. Going overboard in attempts to rehydrate is also common among endurance athletes. A 2005 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that close to one sixth of marathon runners develop some degree of hyponatremia, or dilution of the blood caused by drinking too much water. © 1996-2007 Scientific American, Inc.

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 10450 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Some people with schizophrenia who become violent may do so for reasons unrelated to their current illness, according to a new study analyzing data from the Clinical Antipsychotic Trials for Intervention Effectiveness (CATIE). CATIE was funded by the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The study was published online on June 30, 2007, in the journal Law and Human Behavior. “Most people with schizophrenia are not violent,” said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, M.D. “But this study indicates that the likelihood of violence is higher among people with schizophrenia who also have a history of other disorders, namely childhood conduct problems.” Using data from 1,445 CATIE participants, Jeffrey Swanson, Ph.D., of Duke University, and colleagues examined the relationship between childhood antisocial behavior, including conduct disorder symptoms, and adult violence among people with schizophrenia. The overall percentage of participants who committed acts of violence was 19 percent. Those with a history of childhood conduct problems reported violence twice as frequently (28 percent) as those without conduct problems (14 percent). In both groups, violence was more likely among those who were unemployed or underemployed, living with family or in restrictive settings (such as a halfway house or hospital), been recently arrested, or involved with the police. Violence was associated with alcohol and substance abuse in both groups.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 10449 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Louis Buckley Rats that benefit from the charity of others are more likely to help strangers get a free meal, researchers have found. This phenomenon, known as 'generalized reciprocity', has only ever been seen before in humans. A good example, says Michael Taborsky of the University of Bern, Switzerland, is what happens when someone finds money in a phone box. In controlled experiments such people have been shown to be much more likely to help out a stranger in need following their good luck. In humans, such benevolence can be explained by cultural factors as well as by underlying biology, says Taborsky. But if similar behaviour can be found in other animals, he reasons, an evolutionary explanation would be far more likely. To test for this behaviour in animals, Taborsky trained rats to pull a lever that produced food for its partner, but not for itself. Rats who had received a free meal in this way were found to be 20% more likely to help out an unknown partner than rats who had received no such charity1. Taborsky believes this behaviour isn't confined to just rats and humans. "I'm convinced generalized reciprocity will be very widespread and found in many different animal species, as our study suggests that an underlying evolutionary mechanism is responsible." ©2007 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 10448 - Posted: 06.24.2010