News U Can Use

The ability to remember is not just to glimpse into the past; a sharp memory can help with creativity, productivity and even the ability to imagine the future, according to several psychologists.

Sleep, aging and brain chemistry research were all discussed during several presentations on memory at the 118th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association.

The benefits of sleep are well-documented, but researcher Sara C. Mednick, PhD, and her colleagues are finding that certain stages of sleep actually have distinct roles in people's memory capacity. The REM (rapid eye movement) sleep stage -- where people's dreams are most vivid – is also important for people's memory systems, Mednick found.

Just as elite athletes are selected for top level training after physical tests determine their natural advantages, in the future job seekers may have brain scans to find out what work they're best at, according to new research. Could this be science recognising our special giftedness for specific careers? Or are we about to lose our ability to choose our job?

How brain scans can be helpful in choosing a career depends on how traditional vocational guidance tests correlate with them. Researchers  writing in the open access journal BMC Research Notes have investigated how well eight tests used in vocational guidance correlate to gray matter in areas throughout the brain.

Richard Haier, from the University of California, USA, worked with a team of researchers to investigate the neurological basis for performance on each of the tests. He said, "Individual differences in cognitive abilities provide information that is valuable for vocational guidance. There is some debate, however, as to whether results on individual tests of specific abilities may be more helpful than results on tests of broader factors, like general intelligence. We compared brain networks identified using scores on broad cognitive ability tests to those identified by using specific cognitive tests to determine whether these relatively broad and narrow approaches yield similar results".

Most motorists fancy themselves as better drivers than others on the road, Canadian psychologists have found, according to the BBC.

When Ottawa University researchers polled nearly 400 drivers ranging from the youngest to the very old, virtually all rated themselves favourably.

This was especially true when older drivers were used for comparison, even if the person questioned fell into that category themselves. This bravado could lead to more accidents, the scientists warned.

Clearly, it is impossible that all drivers are better, the psychologists told the Accident Analysis and Prevention journal. Since drivers underestimate their own risk and overestimate their ability, this may make them less cautious on the roads, they say.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.

In contrast to "every man for himself" interpretations of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, Dacher Keltner, a UC Berkeley psychologist and author of "Born to be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life," and his fellow social scientists are building the case that humans are successful as a species precisely because of our nurturing, altruistic and compassionate traits.

They call it "survival of the kindest."

Communicating "I have some good news and some bad news" is better than combining messages into a single, bleak result when small gains and large losses occur together, according to a study in the current issue of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS®).

"The Silver Lining Effect: Formal Analysis and Experiments" is by Peter Jarnebrant of the European School of Management and Technology and Olivier Toubia and Eric Johnson of Columbia University.

The authors ask how people's choices change when they are presented with information in either of two ways: as an integrated whole or as two segregated pieces. For example, they ask, does an investor prefer a statement showing only an aggregate loss of $95 – or one showing a loss of $100 and a gain of $5?

The authors follow upon work first done by RH Thaler in 1985. "Thaler's intuition was that decision makers would prefer to mentally separate a small gain from a big loss, thus providing a silver lining to the loss," explains Prof. Olivier Toubia, one of the authors. This study provides new tests to the original assumptions.

Women with curvy figures are likely to be brighter than waif-like counterparts and may well produce more intelligent offspring, the BBC reports a US study suggests.

Researchers studied 16,000 women and girls and found the more voluptuous performed better on cognitive tests - as did their children.

The bigger the difference between a woman's waist and hips the better.

Researchers writing in Evolution and Human Behaviour speculated this was to do with fatty acids found on the hips.

After one year, a low-calorie, low-fat diet appears more beneficial to dieters' mood than a low-carbohydrate plan with the same number of calories, according to a report in the November 9 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Obese individuals who lose weight tend to have an improved psychological state, including a better mood, according to background information in the article. "Despite the consistency of official recommendations advocating a high-carbohydrate, low-fat, energy-restricted diet for obesity treatment, the obesity epidemic has led to widespread interest in alternative dietary patterns for weight management, including very low-carbohydrate 'ketogenic' diets that are typically high in protein and fat (particularly saturated fat)," the authors write. "While recent clinical studies have shown that low-carbohydrate diets can be an effective alternative dietary approach for weight loss, their long-term effects on psychological function, including mood and cognition, have been poorly studied."

German researchers say babies begin to pick up the nuances of their parents' accents while still in the womb.

The researchers studied the cries of 60 healthy babies born to families speaking French and German. The French newborns cried with a rising "accent" while the German babies' cries had a falling inflection.

Writing in the journal Current Biology, they say the babies are probably trying to form a bond with their mothers by imitating them.