Science of the SpiritS


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Zapping the brain makes people obey social norms

Tanya Lewis
LiveScience
Thu, 03 Oct 2013 13:05 UTC
Human brain
© ShutterstockElectrically stimulating the brain can make people comply with social rules more or less, depending on whether they could be punished.
From dress codes to anti-incest laws, all human societies have social norms that specify how people should behave in various situations. Scientists have now shown that a zap of electricity to the brain can influence whether people choose to comply with these norms or not.

"The complexity of human interactions is so big, so independent, that our society wouldn't function without norms, said study researcher Christian Ruff, an economics professor at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland. "Even though humans are very good at following norms, we're always tempted to break them. We need punishment threats to follow correctly," Ruff told LiveScience.

A previous study using function magnetic resonance imaging showed that the right lateral prefrontal cortex (rLPFC) is activated when people follow social norms to avoid being punished. Ruff and colleagues wondered if stimulating this area could make people more or less sensitive to the threat of punishment.
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Can gardening help troubled minds heal?

Kristofor Husted
NPR.org
Wed, 22 Feb 2012 18:04 UTC
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© Jennifer Sinco Kelleher/APWomen's Correctional Community Center inmate Lilian Hussein checks on ti leaves she planted as part of the prison's farming and gardening program in Kailua, Hawaii. The green ti leaves are often used to wrap food or weave into leis.
If you haven't noticed, gardens are popping up in some unconventional places - from prison yards to retirement and veteran homes to programs for troubled youth.

Most are handy sources of fresh and local food, but increasingly they're also an extension of therapy for people with mental health issues, such as, post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD; depression; and anxiety.

It's called Horticultural Therapy. And some doctors, psychologists and occupational therapists are now at work to test whether building, planting, and harvesting a garden can be a therapeutic process in its own right.
Horticulture therapy dates back to Socrates, but it didn't become a scientific pursuit until the 18th century. That's when Benjamin Rush, That's when Benjamin Rush, a psychiatrist and Declaration of Independence cosignatory, began documenting, how gardening benefited his mentally ill patients.
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Eye 1

Eye Contact: Not as persuasive as we thought

Shaunacy Ferro
PopSci
Wed, 02 Oct 2013 13:00 UTC
Eye Contact
© Guido Reni, The Yorck Project via Wikimedia Commons Look At Me When I'm Talking To You!
Here's a lesson straight out of my high school speech class: When making an argument, make eye contact with your audience. Connect with people. Stare deeply into the depths of their soul and convince them you're right. Except new research suggests that that might be exactly the opposite of what you want to do to be persuasive.

According to a study from the University of British Columbia, the University of Freiburg in Germany and the Harvard Kennedy school, locking eyes with someone discussing controversial views actually made the listener less likely to be persuaded by the speaker's argument.

In one experiment, this study used remote eye-tracking to record where the subjects (20 university students working for course credit) were looking as they watched several videos featuring people talking about controversial issues like assisted suicide, factory farming and nuclear energy. After each video, the participants were asked about their attitudes toward the arguments made in the video and how they felt about the viewpoints expressed by the speaker. The researchers found that subjects spent more time looking into the eyes of the speaker when they already agreed with the arguments the speaker was espousing.
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People 2

Want to succeed in the art of persuasion? AVOID eye contact: Locking glances can lower your chance of winning a person over

Ellie Zolfagharifard
The Daily Mail, UK
Wed, 02 Oct 2013 09:46 UTC
  • The finding is only true if someone is sceptical of the speaker to begin with
  • The longer they hold eye contact, the more sceptical they will become
  • Locking eyes can boost receptiveness if person already agrees with speaker
If you want to persuade someone to do your bidding don't look them in the eye, according to new research.

A new study has shown that - contrary to common belief - locking eyes with someone when the aim is to persuade actually harms the chances of winning them over.

So demanding 'look at me when I talk to you' of someone may not have the desired effect after all
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Image
If you want to persuade someone to do your bidding don't look them in the eye, according to new research. Co-lead of the study, Julia Minson said: 'Whether you're a politician or a parent, it might be helpful to keep in mind that trying to maintain eye contact may backfire'
Experts say that eye contact with opponents in adversarial situations makes them more resistant to persuasion, although it still works as a sign of connection in 'friendly' situations
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Divorce & other life stressors linked with dementia

Rachael Rettner
LiveScience
Mon, 30 Sep 2013 17:30 UTC
Brain
© Shutterstock
Common life stressors - such as divorce, widowhood or losing a job - may increase the risk of dementia later in life, a new study of women in Sweden suggests.

In the study, experiencing such psychosocial stressors in midlife was linked with a 21 percent increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, and a 15 percent increased risk of developing any type of dementia, over nearly four decades.

The findings held even after the researchers took into account factors that may affect dementia risk, such as smoking habits, alcohol consumption and a family history of mental illness.

People who were exposed to psychosocial stressors were also at increased risk of experiencing prolonged periods of distress (or feelings of irritability, tension, nervousness, fear, anxiety or sleep disturbances). However, such distress could not fully explain the link between psychosocial stressors and dementia, meaning that the association may, in part, be due to biological factors that change in response to experiencing stressors, the researchers said.
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People

New research reveals that oxytocin could make us more accepting of others

Jane E. Rubinstein
Rubenstein Associates, Inc.
Fri, 27 Sep 2013 06:40 UTC
Oxytocin - often referred to as the 'love hormone' because of its ability to promote mother-infant attachment and romantic bonding in adults - could also make us more accepting of other people, as found in new research, "Oxytocin Sharpens Self-other Perceptual Boundary," by Neuropsychoanalysis Foundation research grantee Valentina Colonnello Ph.D. published online today in Psychoneuroendocrinology.

Together with Dr. Markus Heinrichs from the Department of Psychology at the University of Freiburg in Germany, Dr. Colonnello found that oxytocin can sharpen the brain's self-other differentiation - a function that has been shown to play a crucial role in social bonding, successful social interactions and the tolerance of others. They also found that oxytocin helps to increase our positive evaluation of other people. This further supports the role of the oxytocinergic system in the empathic response and the modulation of social cognition.

"Social bonding, mutual support, mate preference and parental investment," says Dr. Colonnello, "are all mediated by the oxytocinergic system, which is heavily reliant on a person's ability to appreciate that self and others are both different and valuable."

Participants in the study were shown videos of their own face morphing into an unfamiliar face and vice versa, and were instructed to press a button as soon as they felt that they saw more features belonging to the incoming face. Of the 44 participants, those given oxytocin before the task were significantly faster at identifying the new face, regardless of whether it was their own or that of a stranger.
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Magic Wand

Can phobias be cured in our sleep?

Amanda Fiegl
National Geographic
Thu, 26 Sep 2013 15:36 UTC
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© Brian Gordon Green, National Geographic StockA three year old boy sleeping on a couch in Germantown, Maryland.
The brain can be trained to overcome fear during sleep, new research suggests.You may think you're doing nothing at night, but to your brain, sleep means finally having some spare time to take stock of the day's events. Freed from the distractions of recording new experiences, a deeply sleeping brain can organize and strengthen memories, especially emotional ones.

For Katherina Hauner, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago who studies fear, that makes sleep a fascinating frontier. Hauner's latest research, just published in Nature Neuroscience, explores the connections between fear, memory, and sleep.

Walk me through your study in layman's terms.

The subjects were all healthy adults. While awake, they looked at pictures of faces with neutral expressions and learned to associate these with a mild electric shock, so that eventually these face pictures elicited a fear response in the brain. This is called fear conditioning.

Sounds fun.

Just to clarify, these were not painful shocks! They were simply startling, like you might get from opening a car door.
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Heart

I didn't love my wife when we got married


PopChassid.com
Sat, 28 Sep 2013 04:37 UTC
Image
I'm a ridiculous, emotional, over-sentimental sap. I guess that's why I told my wife I loved her on our second date.

I had tried really hard up to that point to hold it back, honestly. I wanted to tell her on the first date, but I knew that would probably be weird.

I still remember her reaction. She kind of gave me this half-shy, half-amused smile. Then she nodded and looked off into the sky.

I wasn't heartbroken by the response. I think part of me recognized that she was much smarter and more modest than me.

But as time has gone on, I also realized that she knew something that I didn't.

Like most Hasidic Jews (we both became religious later in life), our dating period lasted a very short time. After two months of dating, we were engaged. Three months after that, we were married.

And that whole time I was swooning. This fire was burning in me, a fire that burned just like that second date: I was in love.

But then we got married, and everything changed.
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Circuit that controls overeating found in the brain

Bahar Gholipour
LiveScience
Thu, 26 Sep 2013 13:16 UTC
Overeating
© Shutterstock
When a particular circuit in the brain is stimulated, it causes mice to voraciously gorge on food even though they are well fed, and deactivating this circuit keeps starving mice from eating, a new study shows.

The findings suggest that a breakdown within this neural network could contribute to unhealthy eating behaviors, the researchers said, although more work is needed to see whether the findings are also true of people.

The circuit lies in a brain area called the "bed nucleus of the stria terminalis" (BNST), and affects eating by inhibiting activity in another region, called the lateral hypothalamus, which is known to control eating, according to the study, published today (Sept. 26) in the journal Science.

"Normally, there's a population of neurons in the lateral hypothalamus that's putting the brakes on eating," said study researcher Garret Stuber, a neuroscientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "But when you shut those cells down by stimulating this pathway, that releases the brake, and the animal starts to eat."

The lateral hypothalamus has been known for more than 50 years to be an important part of the brain for controlling eating. Scientists had learned that putting stimulating electrodes in the lateral hypothalamus of animals would influence their eating behavior, but exactly how it works has been a mystery.
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People

Fetching faces and friendly foxes: Selective breeding of foxes reveals why with humans, beauty rules

Emily Murphy
The University of Chicago
Thu, 26 Sep 2013 15:42 UTC
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© Quarterly Review of Biology 2013Left to right: Figure 2, Friendly Fox and Technician, M. Nurgalieva (Photograph used with the permission of Lyudmila Trut); Figure 3, Bonobo Mutual Gaze (Photograph used with the permission of Frans Lanting/lanting.com); Figure 4, Human Mutual Gaze.
"What is beautiful is good" - but why? A recent article in The Quarterly Review of Biology provides a compelling physiological explanation for the "beauty stereotype": why human beings are wired to favor the beautiful ones.

Studies have shown that humans subconsciously attribute positive social qualities (such as integrity, intelligence, and happiness) to physically attractive individuals. Even across cultures there exists a significant consensus on relative beauty: youthful facial features, including, for women, relatively large eyes, a relatively high craniofacial ratio, and a relatively small jaw. In an article published in the September 2013 issue of The Quarterly Review of Biology, Dr. I. Elia, an independent scholar at Cambridge University, bridges genetics, physical and social anthropology, and psychology to interpret the findings of the "farm fox experiment" in Russia to reveal "a possible and replicable demonstration of the origin of beauty while inadvertently illuminating its ancient philosophical connection to goodness via a plausible neurohormonal pathway."

Silver foxes (Vulpes vulpes) were selectively bred for "friendly" behavior toward humans. Within 20 years, a tame line of communicative, trusting, and playful foxes was achieved. Researchers also noticed that in addition to desirable behavioral traits, the foxes also experienced more rapid development to maturity and displayed more "attractive" and more juvenile physical features, including rounder skulls and flatter faces, with smaller noses and shorter muzzles. That these neotenic changes resulted from genetically controlled alterations in friendly behavior may suggest that to humans, facial beauty signals an individual's relatively greater level of approachability and sociability.
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