A sense of humor is widely viewed as beneficial for physical health. However, some limited research suggests that humor may actually be related to increased smoking and alcohol consumption because humorous individuals may take a less serious attitude toward substance use. The purpose of the present study was to explore this hypothesis in greater detail in a sample of 215 undergraduate students. […] Overall, these results support the view that a sense of humor may be related to less healthy habits, at least in the domain of substance use.

{ Europe’s Journal of Psychology | Continue reading }

The more alcoholic drinks people consume, the more attractive they perceive themselves to be. […]

First, women with high levels of estrogen feel prettier, and second, smoking causes a lowered presence of estrogen in your body. So if you’re a female smoker and want to feel more attractive, boost your estrogen levels and stop smoking. Additionally this hormone helps maintain your female features and is vital to your body’s fertility.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

photo { Bill Brandt }

Faking emotions is often necessary for both communicating partners. Van Kleef argued that emotional regulation is affected by social norms in society. People regulate their positive or negative emotions instinctively by decreasing or escalating them, as well by managing them or using controlled processes. Therefore, faking is a possible alternative. It is thought that people fake their emotions to mask their genuine feelings, to avoid a painful truth, or in response to social influence such as peer pressure or ex- pectations and to follow social norms. Such influences may cause individuals to fake their emotions simply to make life more comfortable by pleasing others or avoiding social disapproval. […]

Emotions expressed in an interaction may transmit important information to the observer which may be essential for the relationship. Relationships can be classified in terms of their expected benefits. Clark and Mills distinguished between two types of relationships. In the communal type of relationship (between close friends or family members), the interacting partners experience concern for their partner’s wellbeing. Emotional authenticity is important and crucial for the fulfillment of the emotional needs of both parties in the inter- action; it reflects the meaning and the depth of the relationship. On the other hand, exchange relations are those that take place between associates who are together for the purpose of doing business or working (e.g., colleagues). In these cases the other’s emotional well-being may be irrelevant or even a burden. Thus, in exchange relationships people may prefer others to fake emotions rather than display authentic ones.

Our study investigates anger because anger is the most common negative emotion.

{ Interpersona | Continue reading }

art { Francis Bacon, Study for Self Portrait, 1982-84 }

Unilateral skipping or bipedal galloping is one of the gait types humans are able to perform. In contrast to many animals, where gallop is the preferred gait at higher speeds, human bipedal gallop only occurs spontaneously in very specific conditions (e.g. fast down-hill locomotion). This study examines the lower limb mechanics and explores the possible reasons why humans do not spontaneously opt for gallop for steady state locomotion on level ground. […]

This makes gallop metabolically more expensive and involves high muscular stress at the hips which may be the reasons why humans do not use gallop for steady state locomotion. 

{ The Journal of Experimental Biology | Continue reading }

photo { Lisette Model, Running Legs, 1940–41 }

Researchers from the University of North Carolina have shown that coupling and sexual behavior are related to our gendered behavior.

What they found is that couples who are showing highly gendered behavior (so highly masculine men and highly feminine women) more often select one another as sexual partners and have intercourse more quickly, compared to couples who show less distinct gendered behavior. The latter are the slowest to have sex and the quickest to break up. The authors argue that the distinct gender differences between highly masculine men and highly feminine women may be needed to incite, and maintain, (sexual) interest in a relationship.

So, your love life may just be the result of how much of a macho man or a girly girl you grew up to be.

{ United Academics | Continue reading }

Scientists are once again reporting alarmingly high methane emissions from an oil and gas field, underscoring questions about the environmental benefits of the boom in natural-gas production that is transforming the US energy system.

{ Nature | Continue reading }

previously { It’s an exciting time to be in the energy industry in America }

Since its introduction in 1846, anesthesia has allowed for medical miracles. Limbs can be removed, tumors examined, organs replaced—and a patient will feel and remember nothing. Or so we choose to believe. In reality, tens of thousands of patients each year in the United States alone wake up at some point during surgery. Since their eyes are taped shut and their bodies are usually paralyzed, they cannot alert anyone to their condition. In efforts to eradicate this phenomenon, medicine has been forced to confront how little we really know about anesthesia’s effects on the brain. The doctor who may be closest to a solution may also answer a question that has confounded centuries’ worth of scientists and philosophers: What does it mean to be conscious?

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

Need to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere? They can engineer the insides of a bacterium to do just that. Want clean, biologically based fuels to replace petroleum taken from the ground? Company scientists will design a microbe to poop those out.

Ginkgo is, in essence, a 21st century factory of life. The researchers working there specialize in synthetic biology, a field that seeks to build living things from the ground up. After envisioning what they want new organisms to do, Ginkgo biologists actually grow vials full of redesigned cells. […]

Synthetic biology was born a little more than a decade ago, an offshoot of traditional genetic engineering but distinct in its ambitions, precision and mind-set. Instead of randomly tweaking the genetic blueprints of living organisms and then working backward to identify a cell with a desirable trait, the new field offered the power of designing and building cells with novel functions. Its pioneers dreamed of making armies of organisms that could produce alternative fuels, churn out drugs to battle disease or fill every stomach on the planet by squeezing more food out of each crop acre.

Now, synthetic biologists have laid the groundwork for that radical new future, by building biology’s version of Silicon Valley. One research team has created a new and more complex set of biological building blocks that snap together like Legos, bringing large-scale production of engineered organisms closer to reality. Other scientists have hooked those parts up in a complex living analog of an electrical circuit and programmed it, much like programming a computer. Researchers are now writing code to make cells do things never before thought possible, like hunt down and kill cancer cells.

{ ScienceNews | Continue reading }

A thousand years ago, the Doge Pietro Orseolo II took his triumphant naval fleet to the sea entrance at the Lido and ceremoniously threw a diamond ring into the water, thus marrying his city to the Adriatic and securing Venice’s dominion over its waters and trade routes. […]

When Goethe visited Venice for just over two weeks in 1786, he climbed the campanile twice, at high tide and then at low tide. It was from this tower that, at the age of 37 and already famous, he saw the sea for the first time in his life. […]

Now we know for sure that the ocean is rising faster than Venice will subside.

{ Aeon | Continue reading }

photo { Roman Noven and Tania Shcheglova }

A few months ago I wrote a two-part post about how fMRI and PET scan technology were able to detect differences in the brains of psychopaths compared to non-psychopathic individuals. This area of research has identified that psychopathy has a genetic component, and has even been used in court cases to determine sentencing.

Recently, I came across a story on NPR about a neuroscientist who studies these scans, and decided to analyze his own brain scans and those of his family to determine if psychopathy was present. What he found was more than a little disturbing to him…

James Fallon reported that there was a documented history of criminal activity on his paternal side of the family, (including a relation to Lizzy Borden), that made him curious to view the brain scans of his family. They had all previously submitted brain scans and a blood sample in order to rule out a risk for Alzheimer’s, so he had the materials already. […] Fallon decided to go one step further and analyze the blood samples in search of genes that are associated with violence; namely the MAO-A gene (monoamine oxidase A), specifically MAOA-L (low activity variant). […] Much to his dismay, Fallon again found that everyone in his family has the low-aggression variant of the MAO-A gene, except for one person—himself.

Fallon isn’t, of course, a killer; however, genetically speaking he meets the criteria of psychopathy. […] And therein lays the process of how one person can become a psychopath, and another to go on with a fairly “normal” life.

{ Forensic Focus | Continue reading }

photo { Leon Levinstein, Fifth Avenue, 1959 }

Perhaps no other human trait is as variable as human height. […] The source of that variation is something that anthropologists have been trying to root out for decades. Diet, climate and environment are frequently linked to height differences across human populations.

More recently, researchers have implicated another factor: mortality rate. In a new study in the journal Current Anthropology, Andrea Bamberg Migliano and Myrtille Guillon, both of the University College London, make the case that people living in populations with low life expectancies don’t grow as tall as people living in groups with longer life spans.

{ Smithsonian | Continue reading }

Albert Alexander, a 43-year-old policeman in Oxford, England, was pruning his roses one fall day when a thorn scratched him at the corner of his mouth. The slight crevice it opened allowed harmless skin bacteria to slip into his body. At first, the scratch grew pink and tender. Over the course of several weeks, it slowly swelled. The bacteria turned from harmless to vicious, proliferating through his flesh. Alexander eventually had to be admitted to Radcliffe Hospital, the bacteria spreading across his face and into his lungs.

Alexander’s doctors tried treating him with sulfa drugs, the only treatment available at the time. The medicine failed, and as the infection worsened, they had to cut out one of his eyes. The bacteria started to infiltrate his bones. Death seemed inevitable.

But then, on February 12, 1941, Alexander was injected with an experimental drug: a molecule produced by mold.

The molecule was, of course, penicillin. It had been discovered thirteen years earlier but soon abandoned because there didn’t seem to be any way to turn it into an effective drug. In the late 1930s, Howard Florey and his colleagues at the University of Oxford revived the drug and began testing it on mice. They found the penicillin could cure them of infections by killing their bacteria. Florey then gave a dose of penicillin to a woman dying of cancer and found that it wasn’t toxic to her.

Now Florey and his colleagues wanted to see if it could stop an infection in a human being. Alexander, with nothing left between him and death, was their first subject.

“Striking improvement” was how Florey described what happened next. Within a day, Alexander’s infections were subsiding. After a few more days, his fever broke and much of his face cleared up.

Florey could have saved Alexander’s life, if he hadn’t run out of penicillin after a few days. Nobody but Florey knew how to make the stuff, and his recipe only yielded a tiny amount at a time. To stretch out their supply of penicillin, a member of Florey’s lab would visit the hospital each morning to collect Alexander’s urine. He would carry it back by bicycle to the lab, where the scientists extracted the penicillin that Alexander’s body hadn’t absorbed. Alexander’s doctors then injected the recycled antibotic into Alexander’s arm. […]

Now that they can fish out the DNA of the microbiome, scientists are beginning to get a sense of the staggering diversity of microbes we harbor. Each of us is home to several thousand species. (I’m only talking about bacteria, by the way–viruses, fungi, and protozoans stack an even higher level of diversity on top of the bacterial biodiversity.) My own belly button, I’ve been reliably informed, contains at least 53 species. Many of the species I harbor are different than the ones you harbor. But if you look at the kinds of genes carried by those species, our microbiomes look very similar. […] The microbiome keeps us healthy. It breaks down some of our food into digestible molecules, it detoxifies poisons, it serves as a shield on our skin and internal linings to keep out pathogens, and it nurtures our immune systems, instructing them in the proper balance between vigilance and tolerance. It’s a dependence we’ve been evolving for 700 million years, ever since our early animal ancestors evolved bodies that bacteria could colonize.

{ National Geographic | Continue reading }

photo { Jason Florio }

MATHEMATICS PRIZE: Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982), Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1990), Lee Jang Rim of KOREA (who predicted the world would end in 1992), Credonia Mwerinde of UGANDA (who predicted the world would end in 1999), and Harold Camping of the USA (who predicted the world would end on September 6, 1994 and later predicted that the world will end on October 21, 2011), for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations.

{ Improbable | Continue reading }

quote { thanks Tim }

video still { Adam Magyar }

Making small easy changes to our eating habits on a consistent basis - 25 days or more per month - can lead to sustainable weight loss, according to research. The challenge is to figure out which changes work for specific individuals and how to stick with changes long enough to make them second nature.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

image { Jeroom via Copyranter }

Two recent articles in TiGS by Gerald Crabtree float the notion that we, as a species, are gradually declining in average intellect because we are accumulating mutations that deleteriously affect brain development or function. The observations that prompted this view seem to be: (i) intellectual disability can be caused by mutations in any one of a very large number of genes; and (ii) de novo mutations arise at a low but steady rate in every new egg or sperm. He further proposes that (iii) genes involved in brain development or function are especially vulnerable to the effects of such mutations. Considered in isolation, these could reasonably lead to the conclusion that mutations reducing intelligence must be constantly accumulating in the human gene pool. Thankfully, these factors do not act in isolation.

If we, as a species, were simply constantly accumulating new mutations, then one would predict the gradual degradation of every aspect of fitness over time, not just intelligence. Indeed, life could simply not be sustained over evolutionary time in the face of such genetic entropy. Fortunately (for the species, although not for all individual members), natural selection is an attentive minder. […]

Whether causally or as a correlated indicator, intelligence is strongly associated with evolutionary fitness, even in current societies. The threat posed by new mutations to the intellect of the species is therefore kept in check by the constant vigilance of selection. Thus, despite ready counter-examples from nightly newscasts, there is no scientific reason to think that we humans are on an inevitable genetic trajectory towards idiocy.

{ Cell | Continue reading }

Member-to-group comparisons are prevalent in everyday life. A person might consider whether one politician would make a better president than other candidates, whether one home is more suitable than other prospective homes on the market, whether one food item is healthier than others, or whether one vacation spot is more desirable than others. In turn, the outcomes of such comparisons have important consequences for a person’s choices, decisions, moods, thoughts, and, ultimately, welfare. Indeed, rational models of choice are predicated on the idea that human beings can maximize their utility by identifying the best and worst options in a choice set.

However, recent work by Klar and his colleagues suggests that people are far from unbiased in their comparisons. Individual members of positively valenced groups (e.g., healthy foods, good politicians) are rated better and individual members of negatively valenced groups (e.g., unhealthy foods, bad politicians) are rated worse than the group average, in defiance of simple mathematical rules stating that the average of the individual members must equal the group average. In one of the first studies demonstrating these nonselective inferiority and superiority biases, Giladi and Klar had shoppers evaluate randomly selected pleasant-smelling or unpleasant-smelling soaps and found that any given pleasant soap was rated better than the rest of the group, and any given unpleasant soap was rated worse than the rest of the group. These effects have since been observed with other object categories, including desirable and undesirable acquaintances, restaurants, social groups, pieces of furniture, hotels, and songs, and thus appear to be highly robust and reliable.

In explaining these nonselective biases, Giladi and Klar proposed that when one member of a positive or negative group is compared with others (e.g., how does good restaurant A compare with other good restaurants B and C?), that member is evaluated against a standard that is one part local (restaurants B and C) and one part general (all other restaurants, including bad ones). Thus, although the member that is being evaluated should be compared only with the normatively appropriate local standard, it is actually compared with a hybrid standard that includes both the local and the general standard. Consequently, almost any member of a positive group will be rated better than others (because the general standard is more negative than the local standard), and almost any member of a negative group will be rated worse than others (because the general standard is more positive than the local standard).

In this article, I propose an additional reason (beyond the confusion of local and general standards) why almost any group member is rated more extremely than others in its group.

{ APS/SAGE | Continue reading }

photo { Lise Sarfati }

We have past, present and future; we can imagine various time relationships such as imagining some time in the future from the prospective of looking back at it from even further into the future. But we can also abandon identifying a particular time when we imagine. For example we can simulate what it would be like to be in another’s shoes or what it would be like to be in a different place. Instead of time-traveling, we can space-travel or identity-travel. It seems that the evidence so far implies that future and atemporal imagined events are represented similarly. But there are differences between temporal and atemporal imaginings.

{ thoughts on thoughts | Continue reading }

While risk research focuses on actions that put people at risk, this paper introduces the concept of “passive risk”—risk brought on or magnified by inaction. […]

Avoidance of regret (more precisely “perceived future regret”/ “anticipated regret”) is a major factor in most inaction biases. Support for this idea can be found in Norm Theory which claims that inactions are usually perceived as “normal”, in contrast to actions, which are viewed as “abnormal” and therefore elicit more counterfactual thinking and regret. People regret actions (with bad outcomes) more than inactions, so it is clear why people who try to avoid regret prefer inaction in situations when actions may lead to unwanted outcomes. However, in passive risk taking behavior we refer to situations in which actions can only lead to positive/neutral outcomes, so regret avoidance cannot be the cause of inaction in these instances. People do not avoid cancer tests because they fear they might feel regret after having the tests done. […]

Procrastination is defined as “the act of needlessly delaying tasks to the point of experiencing subjective discomfort.” It may seem as though passive risk taking is essentially procrastination, but there is a major difference: the procrastinator knows that eventually he will have to complete the task at hand, the decision to act has already been established—it is only the actual doing that is delayed. In passive risk taking people decide “not to act,” or in some cases “not act for now.”

{ Judgment and Decision Making | Continue reading }

photos { Paul Kooiker }

According to new research, playing hard to get tests the commitment and quality of any would-be mate. Researchers identified 58 different hard-to-get strategies used, from on/off flirting and being snooty to using voicemail to intercept calls from would-be partners.

“Playing hard to get might be one way that people – women in particular – can test their prospective mate’s commitment and to manipulate their prospective mates to obtain what – or whom – they want,” said the psychologists who carried out the study. “We revealed that the more unavailable a person is, the more people are willing to invest in them.”

In the study, reported in the European Journal of Personality, the researchers carried out four separate projects involving more than 1,500 people, looking at playing hard to get as a mating strategy to see how and why it works. […]

Women used the tactics more than men. That, say the researchers, could be because women are trying to learn more information about a potential mate as they have more to lose in terms of pregnancy. […]

Appearing highly self-confident was the top-ranked tactic, followed by talking to other people and, third, withholding sex.

{ Independent | Continue reading }

Pleasantness of an odor is attributed mainly to associative learning: The odor acquires the hedonic value of the (emotional) context in which the odor is first experienced. Associative learning demonstrably modifies the pleasantness of odors, particularly odors related to foods. Experimentally, classical conditioning paradigms (Pavlovian conditioning) have been shown to modify the responses to odors, not only in animals but also in humans (olfactory conditioning).

In olfactory conditioning an olfactory stimulus is the conditioned stimulus that has been paired with an unconditioned stimulus (e.g., taste). For instance, the pleasantness of odors with originally neutral hedonic value was improved after the odors were paired as few as three times with the pleasant unconditioned stimulus, sweet taste. This type of conditioning, where liking of a stimulus changes because the stimulus has been paired with another, positive or negative, stimulus is called evaluative conditioning.

Naturally occurring evaluative conditioning may be important also in modifying the pleasantness of a partner’s body odors (conditioned stimulus) that are encountered initially during affection and sexual intercourse (unconditioned stimulus), because the sexual experiences presumably provide strong, positive, emotional context.

Searches for human pheromones have focused on androstenes, androgen steroids occurring in apocrine secretions, for example, axillary (underarm) sweat, motivated by the fact that one of them, androstenone, functions as a sex pheromone in pigs. However, some 20–40% of adult humans, depending on age and sex, cannot smell androstenone, although their sense of smell is otherwise intact. To date, no convincing evidence exists to demonstrate that any single compound is able to function as a sexual attractant in humans, although several other types of pheromonal effects (e.g., kin recognition) have been observed.

While many studies have explored potential physiological and behavioral effects of the odors of androstenes, we asked a different question: Could an odor (conditioned stimulus) that is perceived during sexual intercourse gain hedonic value from the intercourse experience (presumably a pleasant unconditioned stimulus) through associative learning? While experimental challenges limit human studies of this kind, we approached the question by asking young adults, randomly sampled regarding the level of sexual experience and olfactory function, to rate the pleasantness of body-related (androstenone and isovaleric acid) and control odorants (chocolate, cinnamon, lemon, and turpentine). We compared the responses of participants with and without experience in sexual intercourse and hypothesized that those with intercourse experience would rate the pleasantness of the odor of androstenone higher than would those without such experience. […]

The results suggest that, among women, sexual experience may modify the pleasantness of the odor of androstenone.

{ Archives of Sexual Behavior/Springer | Continue reading }