A new study in the American Journal Of Epidemiology shows that married people can live up to 17 years longer than those without partners. A combination of emotional health, physical nurturing and companionship play into these results, says Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil.

A new study in the American Journal Of Epidemiology shows that married people can live up to 17 years longer than those without partners.

So if you feel like fixing the car one more time or taking out another load of laundry might kill you - think again. Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil, Ph.D, comments on a study revealing that getting married could extend your life for up to 17 years: "In this case, a longer lifespan likely has to do with human touch and interaction. For example, babies can thrive without sight, without smell, even without hearing. But they cannot thrive without being touched."

The study shows that single men have a 32 percent higher chance of death across their lifetimes than their married counter parts. This means that they could die eight to 17 years prior to the average married man. Statistics for women are better: they face a life expectancy shortened by about seven to 15 years on average.

The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don't even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.

"How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?" said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.

The studies' findings include:

• Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
• People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical -- tried and true.
• Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
• Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea.

For example, subjects had a negative reaction to a running shoe equipped with nanotechnology that adjusted fabric thickness to cool the foot and reduce blisters.

This press release is available in French.

The brains of older people are not slower but rather wiser than young brains, which allows older adults to achieve an equivalent level of performance, according research undertaken at the University Geriatrics Institute of Montreal by Dr. Oury Monchi and Dr. Ruben Martins of the Univeristy of Montreal.

"The older brain has experience and knows that nothing is gained by jumping the gun. It was already known that aging is not necessarily associated with a significant loss in cognitive function. When it comes to certain tasks, the brains of older adults can achieve very close to the same performance as those of younger ones," explained Dr. Monchi. "We now have neurobiological evidence showing that with age comes wisdom and that as the brain gets older, it learns to better allocate its resources. Overall, our study shows that Aesop's fable about the tortoise and the hare was on the money: being able to run fast does not always win the race - you have to know how to best use your abilities. This adage is a defining characteristic of aging."

The original goal of the study was to explore the brain regions and pathways that are involved in the planning and execution of language pairing tasks. In particular, the researchers were interested in knowing what happened when the rules of the task changed part way through the exercise. For this test, participants were asked to pair words according to different lexical rules, including semantic category (animal, object, etc.), rhyme, or the beginning of the word (attack). The matching rules changed multiple times throughout the task without the participants knowing. For example, if the person figured out that the words fell under the same semantic category, the rule was changed so that they were required to pair the words according to rhyme instead.

"I'll meet you at the place near the thing where we went that time," says the character Aaron in the 1987 movie Broadcast News. He and the woman he's talking to have a lot of common ground, the shared territory that makes conversations work. Common ground is why, after you've mentioned Great-Aunt Mildred's 80th birthday party once in a conversation, you can just refer to it as "the party." In a new study to be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, the authors pinpoint the type of memory required to make common ground work and confirm that people with a particular type of amnesia have trouble making common ground in conversation.

People with declarative memory impairment (amnesia) have good memories of what happened before their amnesia started, but they can't form new declarative memories. That's the kind of memory for facts and events, like what they did yesterday or the name of a person they just met. They can still form non-declarative memories, like learning how to ride a bike or other skills, says Rachael Rubin of the University of Illinois. For this study, she worked with five people with declarative memory amnesia and five healthy people. Rubin cowrote the new paper with Sarah Brown-Schmidt and Neal Cohen of the University of Illinois and Melissa Duff and Daniel Tranel of the University of Iowa.

When Susie Clements rang her boyfriend and told him: 'Darling, we need to talk', she hoped it would be a turning point in their relationship.

Both were saddled with hectic work schedules, so Susie wanted to find ways for them to spend more time together. But instead of opening up the lines of communication, Susie says her suggestion to boyfriend Simon had the opposite effect.

'As a couple, the time we'd spent together over the previous months had been magical,' says Susie, 52, a striking blonde divorcee from Lincoln.

'But we were both busy people - and I wanted to work out a way where we could have more of those good times.'

Have you ever stepped into a revolving door and had it unceremoniously slam into your behind? Or tried to cut a slice of cheese with a double-edged knife and ended up with a slice of thumb, instead? (I know, the cheese should've been the first clue it was a bad idea.) Or decided it would be a fun idea to see how far you can throw a three-meter-long tree branch only to have the far end spin up and clip you on your chin after its first arc? Well, maybe I was just an accident-prone kid, or a slow learner, but all these things have happened to me. Luckily, they taught me a lesson, the essence of which being described by G.I. Gurdjieff when he said: "every stick has two ends." If you don't have a good idea of the material you're handling, the 'other end' can wind up smacking you with unanticipated results. I've got the bruises and scars to remind me.

Just like the knives, sticks and revolving doors of my youth, there are many other things that have the ability to 'cut both ways': actions, ideas, even the mind itself is a double-edged sword. In this article I'll be discussing some of the ways this principle has cropped up in our collective history of ideas. Specifically, I want to write about the so-called conflict between science and religion and how it has affected the way we see and interact with the world - the attitude we take towards nature, the cosmos, and ourselves. I think it's an important idea to ponder. Like a government censor at a national newspaper, a worldview determines what we value and therefore what we see; and what we see influences how we respond to the data we take in. It's the grand focuser of attention, like Tolkien's Eye of Sauron, directing its gaze on the world around us (only not quite as nasty, in most cases). But like every self-defeating fantasy-novel baddie, science and religion have both ended up shooting themselves in the foot, losing sight of their original aim and purpose.

Depression is increasingly recognized as an illness that strikes repeatedly over the lifespan, creating cycles of relapse and recovery. This sobering knowledge has prompted researchers to search for markers of relapse risk in people who have recovered from depression. A new paper published in Elsevier's Biological Psychiatry suggests that when formerly depressed people experience mild states of sadness, the nature of their brains' response can predict whether or not they will become depressed again.

Patients who ruminate and activate the brain's frontal lobes are more likely to relapse into depression than those who respond with acceptance and activate visual areas in the back of the brain. Part of what makes depression such a devastating disorder is the high rate of relapse: each time a person becomes clinically depressed, increases their chances of becoming depressed by 16%. However, the fact that some patients are able to fully maintain their recovery points to the possibility that differences in the way they respond to everyday emotional challenges may reduce their chances of relapse.

The acute economic downturn that began in 2008 sometimes is called the "mancession" to reflect its harsher impact on men than women. As recently as last November, 10.4 percent of adult men were unemployed as compared to 8 percent of adult women.

But how do unemployed men cope with their shifting domestic roles, especially when they become financially dependent on a wife or female partner?

One University of Kansas researcher has investigated the impact of joblessness on masculinity and the "breadwinner ideology" within the context of traditional families.

"It changes how men think of themselves," said Ilana Demantas, doctoral student in sociology, who has interviewed 20 recently unemployed men. "Usually men see themselves as supporters of the family, and since a lot of them are no longer able to do that alone on their income, they have to construct their identity in a new way to allow them to still think positively of themselves."

Demantas will present her findings at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

American voters sympathetic to the Tea Party movement reflect four primary cultural and political beliefs more than other voters do: authoritarianism, libertarianism, fear of change, and negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration, according to new research to be presented at the 106th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.

"Our findings show that the Tea Party movement can best be understood as a new cultural expression of late 20th century conservatism," said Andrew J. Perrin, an associate professor of sociology in the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's College of Arts and Sciences, and lead author of the study, "Cultures of the Tea Party."

Findings are based on two telephone polls of registered voters in North Carolina and Tennessee (conducted May 30-June 3, 2010 and Sept. 29-Oct. 3, 2010), and a set of interviews and observations at a Tea Party movement rally in Washington, N.C. Nearly half of poll respondents (46 percent) felt favorably toward the Tea Party movement.

Seeing helps map a place in the mind, but exploration and experience are vital, researchers say.

Seeing and exploring both are necessary for stability in a person's episodic memory when taking in a new experience, say University of Oregon researchers.

The human brain continuously records experiences into memory. In experiments in the UO lab of Clifford G. Kentros, researchers have been studying the components of memory by recording how neurons fire in the hippocampus of rats as they are introduced to new activities. As in humans, brain activation in rats is seen in particular locations called "place cells." It has been believed that these cells together form a mental map of the environment.

There are subtle but important differences, though, in how mapping is done, the researchers say in a paper online in advance of regular publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rats need to directly experience a place to create a stable representation of it in their brains, researchers say. Seeing provides the big picture, but exploration burns it into memory.