The Research Digest wishes all its readers a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Hope you visit again in 2006!
Being a doctor can be incredibly stressful and more than a fifth of junior physicians wish they'd never taken medicine in the first place. Moreover, there's evidence showing that stressed doctors are bad doctors, so it would make sense if applicants to medical school were selected not just on the basis of their academic strengths but also on whether they're likely to enjoy being a doctor. But in the UK, besides exam results, which are known to be a bad predictor of later stress and burnout, the only information medical school selectors currently have to go on are students' personal statements and referees' reports. To find out if these can be used to judge which applicants will become happy, stress-free doctors, Chris McManus and colleagues recruited assessors and showed them applications made in 1990, to see if they could predict which applicants had gone on to become very happy doctors in 2002, and which had become stressed and wanted to change jobs.
For the first time anywhere in the world, psychologists at California-based company Omneuron and Stanford University have demonstrated that people can be taught how to reduce their experience of pain with the aid of real-time images of their brain activity.
It’s no wonder they get bored. According to psychologists James Danckert and Ava-Ann Allman at the University of Waterloo in Canada, time really does pass more slowly for people who are prone to boredom. The researchers came to this conclusion after finding people prone to boredom were less accurate at estimating the duration of intervals lasting from two seconds to a minute, than were people not prone to boredom.
The days of finding Dutch courage in a quick drink before a stressful situation could soon be over – researchers have reported that a few sniffs of the hormone oxytocin can dampen the brain’s fear response to threatening images. The finding follows a report earlier this year showing oxytocin can increase people’s trust.
Contributed by Hannah Corlass at Totton College
Artists and poets who have an embryonic form of schizophrenia called ‘schizotypy’ are responsible for the illness not dying out despite the fact that people with full-blown schizophrenia are far less likely to have children than healthy people. That’s according to Daniel Nettle and Helen Keenoo who believe prevalence rates for schizophrenia remain relatively constant at around one per cent of the population because of the superior mating success of creative people who are schizotypic.
Most textbooks fail to discuss the role of humour in business negotiations but from her analysis of two real-life meetings concerning a multi-million pound transaction, Taina Vuorela at the Helsinki School of Economics reports that humour can be an important strategic tool for negotiators.
If you are learning a skill such as playing the piano, you have to master the fact-based aspect (the sequence of notes) and also the movement-related aspect (moving your fingers in the correct way on the keys). Both aspects improve during practice, but only one continues to improve afterwards, as what you’ve learned is consolidated in your brain. Now researchers have found that which aspect this is depends on whether it’s night or day.
So your boyfriend wants to hold your hand when you’re out together – that’s probably just a sign of affection and shows that he’s proud to be with you. But then he starts showing up unexpectedly to check that you’re doing what you said you’d be doing; refuses to introduce you to his male friends; and tells you he’ll die if you ever leave him. Uh oh! Evolutionary psychologists call these ‘mate retention behaviours’ and a new study shows they could be related to rates of relationship violence.
Early childhood neglect has a lasting effect on the functioning of hormones crucially involved in emotions and social bonding. That’s according to a team of psychologists at the Child Emotion Research Group at the University of Wisconsin.
Contributed by Matt Devereaux at Totton College
Men in rich, Western countries tend to prefer thinner women, whereas men in poorer South Pacific countries tend to prefer bigger women. It’s been argued that this is due to cultural and ethnic differences, but increasingly psychologists now believe it has more to do with socioeconomics, so that men prefer bigger women when resources are scarce because a woman being bigger is an implicit sign that she’s got access to resources.
What if free will is an illusion? Perhaps we make up the reasons for our actions retrospectively, tricking ourselves into believing we know why we did what we did, when really our behaviour was involuntary. A new study lends credence to this suggestion by demonstrating a phenomenon the authors dub ‘choice blindness’.
Here’s a research finding to console Prime Minister Blair following his latest unplanned cabinet reshuffle. Apparently, substituting a team-member for a newcomer can help increase group creativity. That’s according to Hoon-Seok Choi at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea and Leigh Thompson at Northwestern University, USA.
Some young people show all the signs of being addicted to joyriding, the dangerous driving of stolen cars for the thrill of it. That’s according to Sue Kellett (Community Drug and Alcohol Services, Leicester) and Harriet Gross (Loughborough University) who say their research has implications for how to rehabilitate young joyriders.
Following readers' criticisms of the research behind the item "Phew! How rats sigh when they're relieved" (see comments under previous post), the Digest invited lead author of that research, Dr. Stefan Soltysik, to defend his study. To continue the debate, please do use the 'comments' function at the bottom of this post. First, here's what Dr. Soltysik had to say:
If you ever hear a rat sigh, don’t worry it’s not because they’re getting impatient, rather it’s because they’re relieved, a behaviour that probably evolved as a safety signal to other rats. That’s according to Stefan Soltysik and Piotr Jelen at the Limbic System Laboratory of the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology in Warsaw."...sessions with more therapy-focused utterances were associated with better reports of perceived progress in weekly feedback from clients"
The therapists worked with four clients each before training, and six each after the training. Researchers listened to recordings of the therapists’ sessions and noted each time the therapists spoke and whether or not their utterances referred to the therapy or to their relationship with the clients (e.g. “I’ve noticed that you don’t look at me when we are discussing sensitive issues” or “What’s so important about whether I like you or not”). Some therapists claim they already discuss the therapeutic process with clients, but here the researchers confirmed the therapists focused more on the therapeutic process after the training. For example, they looked at the proportion of sessions in which more than one in five therapist utterances were focused on the therapeutic process: this was 3.7 per cent of sessions before training, compared with 21 per cent afterwards.
Whereas countless studies have examined the effect of negative psychological states on levels of cortisol – a corticosteroid hormone that is associated with stress and ill-health – few, if any, have looked at the effect of positive psychological states on the hormone, a fact that Julian Lai (City University of Hong Kong) and colleagues see as part Western society’s disease-oriented view of health that “places disease and health on two opposite ends of a continuum and defines the two states as presence and absence of negative conditions, respectively”."Earlier trauma plays a causal role in schizophrenia, it’s argued, because it can leave people prone to finding...psychotic symptoms distressing"
One suggestion is that some people would not have developed schizophrenia if they hadn’t had an earlier traumatic experience. According to this argument, psychotic experiences (for example, hearing voices; having paranoid thoughts) are not necessarily pathological (e.g. see here), rather they only become problematic if a person finds them distressing. Earlier trauma plays a causal role in schizophrenia, it’s argued, because it can leave people prone to finding these psychotic symptoms distressing.
A growing body of evidence suggests that we understand other people’s actions and intentions by simulating their movements in the motor pathways of our own brain. Now a study suggests that peripheral sensation and proprioception – the sense of where our limbs are in space – also play a role in this process, specifically when it comes to inferring other people’s expectations from the way they move."this 'lost generation' of mature-aged unemployed people needs particular help..."
The findings come from a qualitative study by Rob Ranzijn and colleagues at the University of South Australia. They conducted group interviews with 27 participants aged between 45 and 71, all of whom were seeking work, or wished to change to more satisfactory work. Participants were invited to discuss their situation with the group.
It’s the excuse you’ve always needed to work outside on sunny days – researchers have shown that pleasantly warm, sunny weather can improve people’s mood and mental ability, but not if they’re stuck indoors. Matthew Keller and colleagues tested the mood, short-term memory and open-mindedness of 97 people on various Spring days in Michigan, USA. Nicer weather, indicated by higher temperature and barometric pressure, was associated with better mood, memory and a broader mindset, but only among participants who’d spent more than 30 minutes outside on the day they were tested. Among participants who’d spent less than 30 minutes outside, nicer weather was associated with poorer mood and cognitive ability. Perhaps, the authors suggested, “people consciously resent being cooped up indoors when the weather is pleasant in the Spring”."...Nicer weather was associated with better mood, memory and a broader mindset, but only among participants who’d spent more than 30 minutes outside".
In a second experiment conducted on various days in Spring and early Summer, 121 participants completed tests of their mood and short-term memory before and after relaxing for 30 minutes. Half the participants were asked to relax outdoors, the others indoors. Consistent with the first experiment, the researchers found that when the weather was good, participants’ mood and memory tended to have improved after they’d relaxed outdoors, but not if they’d relaxed indoors.
Research has shown that most of us suffer from a kind of ego-saving delusion that renders us hopelessly poor at recognising our own incompetencies. For example, people who are incompetent will tend to rate their own performance at a task only slightly lower than their more competent peers. Now Deanna Caputo and David Dunning have suggested there’s a simple explanation for this – we’re bad at judging our own ability they say, because, by definition, we’re ignorant of what we don’t know, or solutions we could have found."...patients presenting with a new onset unprovoked seizure should be evaluated for a history of suicide attempt and major depression".
Dale Hesdorffer (Columbia University) and colleagues recruited 324 Icelandic adult and child participants (median age 34 years) who had recently suffered two or more seizures that weren’t caused by fever, head trauma or central nervous system infection, thus pointing to a diagnosis of epilepsy. Six hundred and forty-seven age-matched control participants who lacked a history of epilepsy were selected using the Icelandic population registry. All the adult participants were interviewed over the phone to determine whether they had ever suffered from major depression or had attempted suicide. For both groups, only depression or suicide attempts that occurred prior to when the seizure patients had suffered their seizures were counted. The same information was obtained for the child participants by interviewing their parents.
