Adult onset could be connected to oral and tactile sensitivities in childhood, TAU research finds.

In childhood, rituals like regular schedules for meal, bath, and bed times are a healthy part of behavioral development. But combined with oral and tactile sensitivities, such as discomfort at the dentist or irritation caused by specific fabrics, these rituals could be an early warning sign of adult Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

According to Prof. Reuven Dar of Tel Aviv University's Department of Psychology, hypersensitivity and excessive adherence to childhood rituals may foreshadow the onset of OCD as the child ages. He first suspected the link while working with OCD patients who reported sensitivity to touch and taste as children. Now, in the first comprehensive study of its kind, Prof. Dar and his fellow researchers have established a direct correlation between sensory processing - the way the nervous system manages incoming sensory information - and ritualistic and obsessive-compulsive behaviors.

It turns out you don't have to be miserable during the holidays.

That's now scientifically proven by studies, say UC Berkeley scientists who do those studies.

These wise men and women have come up with quantifiable, tested data showing that with little more than an attitude boost, anyone can get through the toughest of holiday times with not just smiles on their faces, but real warmth in their hearts.

That goes for all those encounters with father-in-laws who could never stand your face, nephews who smash your favorite platter just to hear it shatter and sisters who think you're a loser. Or even cousins fresh out of prison for the New Year.

It's all about concentrating on the things in our lives that work well and being thankful for them, then tossing in a heaping helping of compassion, say the goodness-minded folks at the Greater Good Science Center.

Carrying on nice family rituals, religious or not, that are comforting and foster pleasant togetherness also goes a long way, they say.

Over the course of 90 minutes, Laura and Ark answer questions from the audience at their day-long, World Trade Center, Barcelona conference, October 15th 2011. As always, many fascinating topics were covered and vital information conveyed.


Happy Holidays To All.

When Charles Dickens first published A Christmas Carol in 1843, it was instantly beloved. More than a century and a half later, it remains a timeless tale, but most know the story from glitzy, highly marketed movie remakes. Each passing film depicts a more ghoulish, decrepit evil Scrooge, a more perfect Cratchit family, an almost sickening, syrupy Tiny Tim.

Although Dickens had a tendency to write extreme good/evil contrasts, the above traits are not the core of the original story that takes just an evening to read. The name Scrooge will forever remain vilified even though that's not how the tale culminates.

Intense emotional experiences frequently occur with bodily sensations such as a rapid heart rate or gastrointestinal distress.

It appears that bodily sensation (interoception) can be an important source of information when judging one's emotional. How the brain processes interoception is becoming better understood.

However, how the brain integrates interoceptive signals with other brain emotional processing circuits is less well understood.

Terasawa and colleagues from Japan recently presented results of their research on this interaction of interoception and emotion.

Eighteen graduate and undergraduate students were scanned using a 3T fMRI scanner.

Stimulus cues were separated into those in the interoceptive domain using the Body Perception Questionnaire and the emotional domain using the Positive and Negative Affect scale.

A person's surname can influence their choice of career, experts believe.

Scientists are exploring the theory that people are drawn to certain trades and professions based on the connotations of their surnames.

The phenomenon can be observed among famous figures such as the World champion sprinter Usain Bolt or the 18th century poet William Wordsworth.

However, serious research is now being dedicated to the concept - known as nominative determinism - to explain why it occurs.

New Scientist magazine coined the term after observing that the subject matter of a series of science books and articles bore relevance to the authors' surnames.

John Hoyland, the magazine's feedback editor, said: "A reader wrote in to tell me that they'd come across a paper on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology which was written by J W Splatt and D Weedon.

Young children whose mothers talk with them more frequently and in more detail about people's thoughts and feelings tend to be better at taking another's perspective than other children of the same age.

That's what researchers from the University of Western Australia found in a new longitudinal study published in the journal Child Development.

"Parents who frequently put themselves in someone else's shoes in conversations with their children make it more likely that their children will be able to do the same," according to Brad Farrant, postdoctoral fellow at the Telethon Institute for Child Health Research at the University of Western Australia, the study's lead author.

To learn more about how we develop the ability to take another's perspective, researchers looked at the influence of the way parents interact with and talk to their children. The two-year study involved more than 120 Australian children between the ages of 4 and 6 at the start of the study, both youngsters with typically developing language and those who were delayed in their acquisition of language. The participants were part of a larger ongoing longitudinal research project.

Sleep researchers say they have established that many of the visions of angels and other religious encounters described in the Bible were likely "the products of spontaneous lucid dreams."

In a sleep study by the Out-Of-Body Experience Research Center in Los Angeles, 30 volunteers were instructed to perform a series of mental steps upon waking up or becoming lucid during the night that might lead them to have out-of-body experiences culminating in perceived encounters with an angel. Half of them succeeded, the researchers said.

Specifically, the volunteers were told to try to re-create the story of Elijah, a prophet who is referenced in the Talmud, the Bible and the Quran. In one of the stories in the Bible's Book of Kings, Elijah flees to the wilderness and falls asleep under a juniper tree, exhausted and prepared to die. Suddenly an angel shakes him awake and tells him to eat. He looks around and, to his surprise, sees a loaf of bread baked on some coals and a jug of water. Elijah eats the meal and goes back to sleep. Lead researcher Michael Raduga said this event was chosen from among a multitude of biblical passages involving religious visions during the night, because, "in terms of verifiable results, angels were the ideal choice, as Western culture provides a relatively well-established image for them (wings, white robes, halos, etc.)."

The research, which has not been reviewed by peers for scientific publication, does garner support from some dream researchers who were not involved in Raduga's study. They said the findings support further inquiry into the basis of such religious visions. One dream expert, however, pointed out that many religious tales of angelic encounters occurred in daytime, which suggests they could not have been dreams.

A psychologist has said that new developments in neuroscience show that letting babies "cry it out" is dangerous for their longterm health. Caregivers who respond promptly to a baby's need are more likely to have children who are independent.

According to the Psychologist Darcia Narvaez, Professor of Psychology and Director of the Collaborative for Ethical Education at the University of Notre Dame, writing on Psychology Today, studies on rats with high and low nurturing mothers show there is a critical period of development in which genes for controlling anxiety are turned on for lifelong use. If in the first 10 days of life (equivalent to six months in a human being) a rat is exposed to a low nurturing mother, the genes controlling anxiety never get turned on and the rat lives the rest of its life anxious in new situations unless drugs are administered to alleviate anxiety. The researchers say similar genes exist in humans which are turned on by nurturing.

According to Narvaez: "We should understand the mother and child as a mutually responsive dyad. They are a symbiotic unit that make each other healthier and happier in mutual responsiveness. This expands to other caregivers too."

Neural tangling called synesthesia may have creative benefits, experts say.

A neural condition that tangles the senses so that people hear colors and taste words could yield important clues to understanding how the brain is organized, according to a new review study.

This sensory merger, called synesthesia, was first scientifically documented in 1812 but was widely misunderstood for much of its history, with many experts thinking the condition was a form of mild insanity.

"It's not just that the number two is blue, but two is also a male number that wears a hat and is in love with the number seven," said study co-author David Brang, of the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

"We're not sure if these personifications are [also a symptom of] synesthesia, but we think this is what derailed a lot of scientists from being interested in it. ... They thought these people were making it all up."