Kindness

Social scientists first started studying marriages by observing them in action in the 1970s in response to a crisis: Married couples were divorcing at unprecedented rates. Worried about the impact these divorces would have on the children of the broken marriages, psychologists decided to cast their scientific net on couples, bringing them into the lab to observe them and determine what the ingredients of a healthy, lasting relationship were. Was each unhappy family unhappy in its own way, as Tolstoy claimed, or did the miserable marriages all share something toxic in common...?

Contempt, they have found, is the number one factor that tears couples apart. People who are focused on criticizing their partners miss a whopping 50 percent of positive things their partners are doing and they see negativity when it’s not there. People who give their partner the cold shoulder—deliberately ignoring the partner or responding minimally—damage the relationship by making their partner feel worthless and invisible, as if they’re not there, not valued. And people who treat their partners with contempt and criticize them not only kill the love in the relationship, but they also kill their partner's ability to fight off viruses and cancers. Being mean is the death knell of relationships.

Math Nerd or Bookworm?

Here, teachers are a bit like farmers, Detterman says. And children are a bit like corn. "You have corn plants that do well in certain environments, and don't in others. And the farmer's job is to get the corn plants into the right soil."

Article doesn't really highlight anything particularly surprising, but for that quote, it had to be shared. Make Children of the Corn a much different concept.

Creativity/Intelligence/Mental Disorder

While my workshop study answered some questions, it raised others. Why does creativity run in families? What is it that gets transmitted? How much is due to nature and how much to nurture? Are writers especially prone to mood disorders because writing is an inherently lonely and introspective activity? What would I find if I studied a group of scientists instead?

These questions percolated in my mind in the weeks, months, and eventually years after the study. As I focused my research on the neurobiology of severe mental illnesses, including schizophrenia and mood disorders, studying the nature of creativity—important as the topic was and is—seemed less pressing than searching for ways to alleviate the suffering of patients stricken with these dreadful and potentially lethal brain disorders. During the 1980s, new neuroimaging techniques gave researchers the ability to study patients’ brains directly, an approach I began using to answer questions about how and why the structure and functional activity of the brain is disrupted in some people with serious mental illnesses.

As I spent more time with neuroimaging technology, I couldn’t help but wonder what we would find if we used it to look inside the heads of highly creative people. Would we see a little genie that doesn’t exist inside other people’s heads?

Really long but interesting article about what links the creative brain to personality/mood disorders. Too small a study to count as entirely applicable across a broad spectrum, but a good start nonetheless.

Love on NPR

You are at a table for two, sitting with your girlfriend or boyfriend, when, for no good reason (you can't help it, you didn't mean to do it), you yawn. It's a big, gaping, jaw-extending, embarrassing yawn and because you didn't cover your face, oh, God, she/he sees it. A second or two goes by, and then ... something doesn't happen. Your girlfriend/boyfriend doesn't yawn back.

Should you be alarmed?

Empathy helps kids understand sarcasm

“It’s a very tricky thing to recognize that people are deliberately hiding what they mean,” Pexman says. “Children have to listen and look beyond the words to what’s in the mind of the speaker and the emotion they’re trying to convey. Empathy seems to help children get beyond the literal meaning of the words.”

Pexman and her colleagues wondered why some kids got the joke earlier. They suspected that children who were more empathetic might be quicker to recognize the contradiction between what was being said and the tone and expression of the person saying it....

When the researchers correlated the empathy findings with the responses to the puppet shows they saw a clear role for empathy: the more empathetic kids were, the more likely it was that they’d correctly identify sarcastic comments in the puppet shows.

I'd love to see the results of this across a larger group over a longer time. I'd be curious to see how this differs across cultural and class upbringings, as well as whether this understanding of sarcasm has any impact as to how the kids employ both sarcasm and empathy as they age.

Siblings Are Why You Drink

Children with faster verbal development may be more likely to have alcohol problems as adult, according to a new study....

In addition to the earlier talkers and readers drinking more, they also found that the more verbally-proficient group was four times as likely to get drunk at least once a month compared to their counterparts.

Though the behavior might sound alarming, the authors noted that the verbally-skilled twins' frequent drinking was not enough to categorize them with a drinking disorder. No connection was made between being the first speaker or reader and a propensity for alcohol addiction.

The study authors hypothesized that while higher intelligence may make people pause to think of the consequences, it may also make them more willing to try more risky things.

Also, verbal intelligence in particular makes people more social, and in fact, the study authors discovered that the earlier speakers and readers had more friends than the twins that had less verbal prowess. In turn, that could make them more likely to be in more social situations where there is alcohol.

Thanks Ja', for making sure I read fast by not waiting for me to finish a page before you turned it. Totally fair when you were only 4 years older. Also, does it count as social if I drink while knitting things for other people?

Ain't it the Truth

Managers spend nearly 17 percent of their working hours dealing with poor performers, according to a report from staffing firm Robert Half International. That's basically a full day a week that could have been spent being productive.

On the positive side, all the eye rolling is good for your vision.

Vegetables = Happiness

It’s a new research finding likely to be protested by 5-year-olds everywhere: People who eat more vegetables and fruits are significantly happier than those who eschew such foods.

Dartmouth University’s Daniel Blanchflower looked at the eating habits of 80,000 British citizens. He, alongside two British researchers, saw that mental well being — satisfaction with one’s life on a scale of one to 10 — rose alongside each serving of produce consumed daily.

Brussel sprouts make me happy. Spaghetti squash makes me happy. Vegetables are amazing. I concur with the results of this study.

Damned if you do.....

In health news: Credible outlet the Daily Mail cites a study (without links) that 50% of parents drink every week, 60% of those thought it had no effect on their children. Obviously, they should all have their children removed as these results are incredibly disturbing.

Also, released evidence of a study that cracking your neck raises you likelihood of stroke, which is completely new and damning evidence and not at all the same as released in 2003.

 Obviously, I would be a model parent as long as I have a good life insurance policy.

The Way We Live: Drowning in Stuff

What the researchers gleaned was an unflinching view of the American family, with all its stresses and joys on display. They’ve organized their findings into a book, scheduled to be available next week, called “Life at Home in the 21st Century.” It’s full of intriguing data points about the number of possessions the families owned (literally, thousands), much of it children’s toys. Women’s stress-hormone levels spiked when confronted with family clutter; the men’s, not so much. Finally, there was a direct relationship between the amount of magnets on refrigerators and the amount of stuff in a household.

I have 32 magnets on my fridge, I also own a lot of craft supplies, books, and too many clothes. I'd be interested in seeing a large scale study on that point alone.

Eat Less Meat

They found a 29% increase in pancreatic cancer risk for men eating 120g per day of red meat but no increased risk among women. This may be because men in the study tended to eat more red meat than women.

"If diet does affect pancreatic cancer then this could influence public health campaigns to help reduce the number of cases of this disease developing in the first place."

"Regardless of this latest research, we have already established a strong link between eating red and processed meat and your chances of developing bowel cancer, which is why WCRF [World Cancer Research Fund] recommends limiting intake of red meat to 500g cooked weight a week and avoiding processed meat altogether."

Why Are Smart People Ugly?

Why are smart people usually ugly? I get this isn't always the case, but there does seem to be a correlation. Attractiveness doesn't predict intelligence (not all ugly people are smart), but it seems like intelligence can be a good predictor for attractiveness (smart people are usually on the ugly side). Keep in mind, I have nothing against people who are really brilliant, I've just always wondered.

The answer: They’re not.

Oh, how the Explainer loves a false premise.

Fish Misrepresented

Recent studies indicate that between 20 percent and 70 percent or more of snapper, cod, grouper, and wild salmon are mislabeled at restaurants and stores. Oceana, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C., that is campaigning against seafood fraud, also discovered mislabeling this year when it conducted DNA tests of fresh and frozen fish at 15 Boston-area supermarkets. Nearly one in five fillets tested had the wrong species name, according to Oceana. Atlantic cod was the most frequently misrepresented fish.

Those were among the findings of a five-month Globe investigation into the mislabeling of fish. It showed that Massachusetts consumers routinely and unwittingly overpay for less desirable, sometimes undesirable, species - or buy seafood that is simply not what it is advertised to be. In many cases, the fish was caught thousands of miles away and frozen, not hauled in by local fishermen, as the menu claimed. It may be perfectly palatable - just not what the customer ordered. But sometimes mislabeled seafood can cause allergic reactions, violate dietary restrictions, or contain chemicals banned in the United States.

Truly doubting this is any better elsewhere, especially since it's a lot harder to get actually fresh fish in a non-costal area.

Women Hate Pink

Because it's not the color of pink that women hate, according to the study, so much as the fact that pink is "a gender cue" that triggers a "defensive response" among women.

When women wrote an essay about gender, just 42% of them said they would donate to ovarian cancer research. When they wrote a gender-neutral essay, 77% did. And those who saw a pink ad about breast cancer were significantly less likely to say that they'd contract the disease than those who saw an ad with neutral colors."

News flash, ladies: if the real world was "gender-neutral," we wouldn't be talking about breast cancer in the first place, we'd just be talking about "chest cancer." Or, more likely, "testicular cancer." Jesus. You could have told us this before we wore that hideous ribbon!

Ok, so maybe I shouldn't expect much here, considering the source is Gawker. But the overuse of quotation marks, the inaccurate description of color as a means of women hating each other, and the comments focused solely on which ethnicity should actually attempt to wear colors such as pink and yellow, makes me just sad that the point of the entire study was ignored.

Women hate pink. As the interview by one of the researchers explains, it is more that the use of pink has been pushed over the last century as a gender marker of femininity, and the reason women rebel against it is that in the context of such a campaign as Breast Cancer Awareness, pink is a terrifying omen. Pink signifies that it isn't just a cancer that could happen to a faceless population, but that every woman out there has over a 10% chance of developing the disease. When faced with that, most people will do the obvious and run from it, not embrace it. It's a natural instinct to flee from something that you are scared of. And whether it be a noble idea, such as raising money for research or something as base and ridiculous as pink handguns aimed at women, the influx of such a now-generic color that is considered gender related is cause for a vast amount of women to despise it.

I'll be the first to admit that I do not like the color, and when faced with the exact same material about breast cancer in a neutral color I would be more likely to respond. Perhaps if we started a campaign for prostate cancer for men that was color coded in blue and let it run for decades, men would have the same disgust.

When does crime happen?

Crime based on time of day. Seriously, what's up with Indianapolis? Rest breaks?

Stereotypes

Hunch has released an infographic that shows some basic stereotypes based on data input by the site's users. Interesting stuff.

National Running Day Infographic

Bit of a follow-up to National Running Day. Go me for bringing down the averages on the top three statistics.

Your Brain in Love

Men and women can now thank a dozen brain regions for their romantic fervor. Researchers have revealed the fonts of desire by comparing functional MRI studies of people who indicated they were experiencing passionate love, maternal love or unconditional love. Together, the regions release neuro­transmitters and other chemicals in the brain and blood that prompt greater euphoric sensations such as attraction and pleasure.

Brainy Articles

How to Spot a Psychopath:
"They give you a psychopath test," said Tony. "The Robert Hare Checklist. They assess you for 20 personality traits. Superficial charm. Proneness to boredom. Lack of empathy. Lack of remorse. Grandiose sense of self-worth. That sort of thing. For each one they score you a 0, 1 or 2. If your total score is 30 or more out of 40, you're a psychopath. That's it. You're doomed. You're labelled a psychopath for life. They say you can't change. You can't be treated. You're a danger to society. And then you're stuck somewhere like this."

The Cognitive Cost of Doing Things:
There's no such thing as a free lunch, and that goes for your brain, too. Every time you amass the willpower to do anything, it has mental costs. Writer and strategist Sebastian Marshall identifies a few of those cognitive costs to understand how to get more done while conserving as much of your mental reserve as possible.

You're Living in a Computer Simulation:
The whole "reality is an illusion" idea has been kicked around by everyone from Siddhartha to the existentialists. It is Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom who is most often associated with the idea that we are living in a computer simulation

Of Course

Where to live to avoid a natural disaster. And, not surprisingly, Dallas area is the worst place to be. This seems just right.