This Is Really Interesting

Worth Noting

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  Guitarists are more attractive – two studies show

  Two independent studies have found that women find men more attractive if they are holding a guitar

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  Fish oil – the answer to junk food?

  180 research papers suggest fish oils could minimise the effects that junk food can have on the brain

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  Champagne – a dementia cure?

  New research shows that drinking one to three glasses of champagne a week may counteract the memory loss associated with ageing, and could help delay the onset of degenerative brain disorders, such as dementia.

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  Markets erode moral values

  People ignore their own moral standards when acting as market participants, searching for the cheapest electronics, fashion or food.

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  Sacred lotus genome sequence enlightens scientists

  Researchers have sequenced the lotus genome, and the results offer insight into the heart of some of its mysteries

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  Anxious; try kava – university study

  A world-first completed clinical study by an Australian team has found Kava, a medicinal South Pacific plant, significantly reduced the symptoms of people suffering anxiety.

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  Why we love it or hate it: The 3 E’s

  Brands to which we are loyal, evoke warm feelings and provide pleasure, speak to who we are and help manage the problems we have in daily life.

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  Social Connections Drive the ‘Upward Spiral’ of Positive Emotions and Health

  People who experience warmer, more upbeat emotions may have better physical health because they make more social connections

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  Today’s Teens: More materialistic but less willing to work

  Twenge and Kasser show that there is in fact a growing gap for today’s young adults between materialism and the desire to work hard.

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  Risk of depression influenced by quality of relationships

  A large, national study has found that people are better off not having a spouse than having poor relationship with one.

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  Noise does affect our health

  Exposure to noise, for example from road traffic, may adversely affect the cardiovascular system.

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  Connections to the world makes life meaningful

  Experiencing connections, regularities, and coherence in their environment may lead people to feel a greater sense of meaning in life, according to a new study published in Psychological Science

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  Anorexia – may be bad brain wiring

  People with Body Dysmorphic Disorder have, in essence, global “bad wiring” in their brains — that is, there are abnormal network-wiring patterns across the brain as a whole.

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  How would you like your helper – a human or robot?

  More than half of healthcare providers interviewed said that if they were offered an assistant, they preferred it to be a robotic helper rather than a human

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  Talking a lot about yourself – a sign of distress

  A German study claims that people who are more prolific users of “I” and “Me” tend to have more interpersonal problems and to experience more depression.

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  “Anxiously attached” skilled lie detectors

  People who worry habitually about separation and abandonment – the “anxiously attached” – tend to be highly skilled at lie detection, an attribute that means they excel at poker

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  In sex, happiness hinges on keeping up with the Joneses

  Sex apparently is like income: People are generally happy when they keep pace with the Joneses and they’re even happier if they get a bit more.

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  Switching addiction off

  Could drug addiction treatment of the future be as simple as an on/off switch in the brain? A study in rats has found that stimulating a key part of the brain reduces compulsive cocaine-seeking and suggests the possibility of changing addictive behavior generally.

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  Why we buy music – brain scans show

  A new study reveals what happens in our brain when we decide to purchase a piece of music when we hear it for the first time. The study, conducted at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital – The Neuro, McGill University and published in the journal Science on April 12, pinpoints the specific brain activity that makes new music rewarding and predicts the decision to purchase music.

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  Strong willed friends may help your self control

  New research suggests that people with low self-control prefer and depend on people with high self-control, possibly as a way to make up for the skills they themselves lack.

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  Organic labels and the ‘health halo effect’

  An organic label can be very strong: studies have shown that this simple label can lead us to think that a food is healthier, through what is known as the ‘health halo effect’.

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  Daily stress gets to us

  Participants’ overall levels of negative emotions predicted psychological distress (e.g., feeling worthless, hopeless, nervous, and/or restless) and diagnosis of an emotional disorder like anxiety or depression a full decade after the emotions were initially measured. Participants’ negative emotional responses to daily stressors — such as argument or a problem at work or home — predicted psychological distress and self-reported emotional disorder ten years later.

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  Eat fish – live longer

  Older adults who have higher levels of blood omega-3 levels—fatty acids found almost exclusively in fatty fish and seafood—may be able to lower their overall mortality risk by as much as 27% and their mortality risk from heart disease by about 35%, according to a new study from Harvard School of Public Health

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  More mindfulness – less stress hormone

  Focusing on the present rather than letting the mind drift may help to lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, suggests new research from the Shamatha Project at the University of California, Davis.

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  Restoring near vision without glasses

  An emerging technique called hyperopic orthokeratology (OK) may provide a new alternative for restoring near vision without the need for glasses. For middle-aged patients with presbyopia, wearing OK contact lenses overnight can restore up-close vision in one eye, according to the study by Paul Gifford, PhD, FAAO, and Helen A Swarbrick, PhD, FAAO, of University of New South Wales, Sydney.

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  Anxiety, depression big risk factors for heart patients

  Heart disease patients who have anxiety have twice the risk of dying from any cause compared to those without anxiety, according to new research in the Journal of the American Heart Association. Patients with both anxiety and depression have triple the risk of dying, researchers said. “Many studies have linked depression to an increased risk of death in heart disease patients,” said Lana Watkins, Ph.D., lead author of the study and an associate professor in Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, N.C. “However, anxiety hasn’t received as much attention.”

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  Mindfulness improves self knowledge – psychologists

  Recent research has highlighted the fact that we have many blind spots when it comes to understanding our patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving. Despite our intuition that we know ourselves the best, other people have a more accurate view of some traits (e.g., intellect) than we do. Mindfulness may provide us with the insights we lack, say psychologists.

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  You are what you like on Facebook

  Surprisingly accurate estimates of Facebook users’ race, age, IQ, sexuality, personality, substance use and political views can be inferred from automated analysis of only their Facebook Likes – information currently publicly available by default.

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  Does winning an Emmy or an election mean you will live longer than those you beat?

  Research has long linked high socioeconomic status with better health and lower mortality. But what’s remained unclear is whether this association has more to do with access to resources (education, wealth, career opportunity, etc.) or the glow of high social status relative to others. Scholars call the latter “relative deprivation.

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  Emotion-health connection a global phenomena

  Positive emotions are known to play a role in physical well-being, and stress is strongly linked to poor health, but is this strictly a “First World” phenomenon? In developing nations, is the fulfilment of basic needs more critical to health than how one feels? A UC Irvine researcher has found that emotions do affect health around the world and may, in fact, be more important to wellness in low-income countries.

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  Is this peptide a key to happiness?

  What makes us happy? Family? Money? Love? How about a peptide? The neurochemical changes underlying human emotions and social behavior are largely unknown. Now though, for the first time in humans, scientists at UCLA have measured the release of a specific peptide, a neurotransmitter called hypocretin, that greatly increased when subjects were happy but decreased when they were sad.

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  Toddler ‘functionally cured’ of HIV infection

  A two-year-old child born with HIV infection and treated with antiretroviral drugs beginning in the first days of life no longer has detectable levels of virus using conventional testing despite not taking HIV medication for 10 months, according to findings presented today at the Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections (CROI) in Atlanta.

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  Laughter and flirting – the links

  What is humour for? Of all the explanations, among the better supported is the idea that it acts as a mating signal, Dr Christian Jarrett writes for the British Psychological Society. Research with heterosexuals suggests that men, in particular, use humour to show-off their intelligence and good genes to women. A similar but alternative proposal is that wit is used by a male or female joker to convey their sexual interest to a person they find attractive. A new study finds some support for the latter theory, in that wittier people were seen as particularly attractive for a short-term fling.

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  Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Aerobics?

  Leaving out an important fourth R—aerobics—could actually be counterproductive for increasing school test scores.

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  Rat brain-to-brain wiring breakthrough

  Researchers have electronically linked the brains of pairs of rats for the first time, enabling them to communicate directly to solve simple behavioral puzzles.