News U Can Use

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.

Angry words and gestures are not the only way we get a sense of how temperamental a person is. A quick glance at someone's facial structure may be enough for us to predict their tendency towards aggression, according to new findings in the journal Psychological Science.

 “We’re prone to snapjudgments,” researcher Cheryl M McCormick says. “And some of those judgments are very accurate. I think it’s interesting that we’re so different from our ancestors, yet the forces that shaped us psychologically are still with us today.”

The measure that signals aggression is the facial width-to-height ratio (WHR). It's determined by measuring the distance between the right and left cheeks and the distance from the upper lip to the mid-brow. During childhood, boys and girls have similar facial structures, but during puberty, males develop a greater WHR than females. Previous research has suggested that males with a larger WHR act more aggressively than those with a smaller WHR. For example, studies have shown that hockey players with greater WHR earn more penalty minutes per game than players with lower WHR.

A period of careful eating and regular exercise can stave off diabetes for a decade, the BBC reports.

US researchers followed up nearly 3,000 overweight people who had taken part in a three year diabetes prevention programme.

The group had initially been divided into three - assigned either to a diet and exercise programme, the diabetes drug metformin or a placebo.

The Lancet report notes it was the dieters who reaped the most benefit.

Angry words and gestures are not the only way to get a sense of how temperamental a person is. According to new findings in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, a quick glance at someone's facial structure may be enough for us to predict their tendency towards aggression.

Facial width-to-height ratio (WHR) is determined by measuring the distance between the right and left cheeks and the distance from the upper lip to the mid-brow. During childhood, boys and girls have similar facial structures, but during puberty, males develop a greater WHR than females. Previous research has suggested that males with a larger WHR act more aggressively than those with a smaller WHR. For example, studies have shown that hockey players with greater WHR earn more penalty minutes per game than players with lower WHR.

Biofield therapies, which claim to use subtle energy to stimulate the body's healing process, are promising complementary interventions for reducing the intensity of pain in a number of conditions, reducing anxiety for hospitalized patients and reducing agitated behaviors in dementia, over and above what standard treatments can achieve. However, longer-term effects are less clear. Dr. Shamini Jain, from the UCLA Division of Cancer Prevention and Control Research, and Dr. Paul Mills, from the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, and the Moores Comprehensive Cancer Center in San Diego, US, publish their review1 of the science behind biofield therapies online this week in Springer's International Journal of Behavioral Medicine.

A significant number of patients use biofield therapies - Reiki, therapeutic touch and healing touch - despite very little research proving that they work. These techniques have been used over millennia in various cultural communities to heal physical and mental disorders. They have only recently been under the scrutiny of current Western scientific methods.

In a detailed review of 66 clinical studies looking at biofield therapies in different patient populations with a range of ailments, Jain and Mills examine the strength of the evidence for the efficacy of these complementary therapies. They show that overall, published work on biofield therapies is of average quality - in scientific terms.

Bearing that in mind, they find strong evidence that biofield therapies reduce pain intensity in free-living populations, and moderate evidence that they are effective at lowering pain in hospitalized patients as well as in patients with cancer.