Science of the SpiritS


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Night owls more likely to have Dark Triad of personality traits

Richard Gray
The Telegraph, UK
Fri, 26 Jul 2013 01:52 UTC
Dark Triad
© AlamyResearch suggests people who like staying up late tend to have more evil personality traits.
Psychologists have found that people who are often described as "night owls" display more signs of narcissism, Machiavellianism and psychopathic tendencies than those who are "morning larks".

The scientists suggest these reason for these traits, known as the Dark Triad, being more prevalent in those who do better in the night may be linked to our evolutionary past.

They claim that the hours of darkness may have helped to conceal those who adopted a "cheaters strategy" while living in groups.

Some social animals will use the cover of darkness to steal females away from more dominant males. This behaviour was also recently spotted in rhinos in Africa.

Dr Peter Jonason, a psychologist at the University of Western Sydney, said: "It could be adaptively effective for anyone pursuing a fast life strategy like that embodied in the Dark Triad to occupy and exploit a lowlight environment where others are sleeping and have diminished cognitive functioning.

"Such features of the night may facilitate the casual sex, mate-poaching, and risk-taking the Dark Triad traits are linked to.

"In short, those high on the Dark Triad traits, like many other predators such as lions, African hunting dogs and scorpions, are creatures of the night."

Dr Jonason and his colleagues, whose research is published in the journal of Personality and Individual Differences, surveyed 263 students, asking them to complete a series of standard personality tests designed to test their score for the Dark Triad traits.
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Magic Wand

Finger points to good research skills

Polly Curtis
The Guardian
Wed, 20 Oct 2004 13:38 UTC
Male scientists are good at research because they have the same hormone levels as women, according to new study involving the measurement of relative finger lengths.

Research into male scientists at Bath University has revealed that they have as much of the female hormone oestrogen as the male hormone testosterone, a combination more usual in women.

This, say the researchers, is why they are so clever.

Previous research has revealed that this unusual combination of hormones leads to better development of the right side of the brain which is where spatial and analytical skills are governed.

The study, which has been submitted to the British Journal of Psychology, also found that women social scientists tended to have higher levels of testosterone, making their brains closer to those of males in general.
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Post-It Note

Scientists discover brain's 'misery molecule' which affects stress, anxiety and depression

Amanda Williams
Mail Online
Sun, 21 Jul 2013 13:19 UTC
misery molecule
Scientists have found the brain's 'misery molecule' believed to be responsible for all of our feelings of stress and anxiety
Scientists have found the brain's 'misery molecule' believed to be responsible for all of our feelings of stress and anxiety.

Researchers believe that the protein - named CRF1 - could also be linked to depression.

A team from Heptares Therapeutics, a medical company based in Hertfordshire, used one of the world's most powerful x-ray machines to study the brain's pituitary gland.

It has long been known that the gland controls stress, depression and anxiety by releasing stress chemicals, the Sunday Times reports.

Now, scientists have discovered the response is triggered by CRF1 - which is found in the outer membranes of pituitary cells.

Fiona Marshall, chief scientific officer at Heptares, told the paper: 'Stress related diseases such as depression and anxiety affect a quarter of adults each year, but what many people don't realise is that these conditions are controlled by proteins in the brain, one of which is CRF1.'

She added that now they have worked out the structure of it and how it works it could open up potential to design drugs to control it.
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Bulb

Brain picks out salient sounds from background noise by tracking frequency and time


Wellcome Trust
Tue, 23 Jul 2013 12:07 UTC
New research reveals how our brains are able to pick out important sounds from the noisy world around us. The findings, published online today in the journal eLife, could lead to new diagnostic tests for hearing disorders.

Our ears can effortlessly pick out the sounds we need to hear from a noisy environment - hearing our mobile phone ringtone in the middle of the Notting Hill Carnival, for example - but how our brains process this information (the so-called 'cocktail party problem') has been a longstanding research question in hearing science.

Researchers have previously investigated this using simple sounds such as two tones of different pitches, but now researchers at UCL and Newcastle University have used complicated sounds that are more representative of those we hear in real life. The team used 'machine-like beeps' that overlap in both frequency and time to recreate a busy sound environment and obtain new insights into how the brain solves this problem.

In the study, groups of volunteers were asked to identify target sounds from within this noisy background in a series of experiments.
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People 2

Casual sex correlated with anxiety, depression


The Times Of India
Thu, 18 Jul 2013 07:30 UTC
University students, who engage in casual sex - having intercourse with someone whom you have known for less than a week -suffer from higher levels of general anxiety, social anxiety and depression, researchers have claimed.

3,900 straight students in the age group of 18 and 25 from 30 different US colleges were questioned about their sex lives and mental well-being.

The researchers found that people who recently engaged in casual sex seemed to have low levels of self-esteem, happiness and life-satisfaction than others who didn't hook-up with a relative stranger in last 1 month, the New York Daily News reported.
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People 2

Origins and conceptual models of compassion

Stephen Porges, PhD
Youtube
Mon, 27 Aug 2012 19:11 UTC
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Eye 1

If you're not looking for it, you probably won't see it

Jessica Maki
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Fri, 19 Jul 2013 12:42 UTC
Brigham and Women's Hospital study examines sustained inattentional blindness in expert observers.

If you were working on something at your computer and a gorilla floated across your computer screen, would you notice it? You would like to think yes, however, research shows that people often miss such events when engaged in a difficult task. This is a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness (IB). In a new study from Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston, researchers have found that even expert searchers, operating in their domain of expertise, are vulnerable to inattentional blindness. This study published this week Psychological Science.

"When engaged in a demanding task, attention can act like a set of blinders, making it possible for stimuli to pass, undetected, right in front of our eyes," explained Trafton Drew, PhD, post-doctoral researcher at BWH and lead author on this study. "We found that even experts are vulnerable to this phenomenon."
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People

Unattractive people more likely to be bullied at work

Timothy Judge
University of Notre Dame
Wed, 17 Jul 2013 06:07 UTC
It's common knowledge that high school can be a cruel environment where attractive students are considered "popular," and unattractive kids often get bullied. And, while that type of petty behavior is expected to vanish with adulthood, new research proves it does not.

Colleagues can be just as immature as classmates.

The study by Timothy Judge, professor of management at the University of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business, and Brent Scott from Michigan State University, is the first to link attractiveness to cruelty in the workplace.

In "Beauty, Personality, and Affect as Antecedents of Counterproductive Work Behavior Receipt," recently published in Human Performance, the researchers examine counterproductive work behavior and its effect on employees. They show that physical attractiveness plays as much of a role as personality in how a person is treated in the workplace. The researchers surveyed 114 workers at a health care facility, asking them how often their co-workers treated them cruelly, including saying hurtful things, acting rudely and making fun of them. Through digital photos, the workers' "attractiveness" was then judged by others who didn't know them.
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People 2

Long-distance relationships can form stronger bonds than face-to-face ones

John Paul Gutierrez
International Communication Association
Thu, 18 Jul 2013 06:03 UTC
Long-distance couples disclose more and idealize partners' behaviors.

The long-distance relationship has plagued college students and people relocated for work for ages. These relationships are seen as destined to fail, but are they actually creating stronger bonds than a geographically closer relationship? A recent paper published in the Journal of Communication found that people in long-distance relationships often have stronger bonds from more constant, and deeper, communication than normal relationships.

Crystal Jiang, City University of Hong Kong and Jeffrey Hancock, Cornell University, asked dating couples in long-distance and geographically close relationships to report their daily interactions over different media: face-to-face, phone calls, video chat, texting, instant messenger, and email. Over a week, they reported to what extent they shared about themselves and experienced intimacy, and to what extent they felt their partners did the same thing. When comparing the two types of relationships, Jiang and Hancock found that long-distance couples felt more intimate to each other, and this greater intimacy is driven by two tendencies: long-distance couples disclosed themselves more, and they idealized their partners' behaviors. These two tendencies become more manifested when they communicated in text-based, asynchronous and mobile media because they made more efforts to overcome the media constraints.
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Bulb

Birds and humans have similar brain wiring

Colin Smith
Imperial College London
Wed, 17 Jul 2013 12:51 UTC
You may have more in common with a pigeon than you realize, according to research.

A researcher from Imperial College London and his colleagues have developed for the first time a map of a typical bird brain, showing how different regions are connected together to process information. By comparing it to brain diagrams for different mammals such as humans, the team discovered that areas important for high-level cognition such as long-term memory and problem solving are wired up to other regions of the brain in a similar way. This is despite the fact that both mammal and bird brains have been evolving down separate paths over hundreds of millions of years.

The team suggest that evolution has discovered a common blueprint for high-level cognition in brain development.

Birds have been shown in previous studies to possess a range of skills such as a capacity for complex social reasoning, an ability to problem solve and some have even demonstrated the capability to craft and use tools.

Professor Murray Shanahan, author of the study from the Department of Computing at Imperial College London, says: "Birds have been evolving separately from mammals for around 300 million years, so it is hardly surprising that under a microscope the brain of a bird looks quite different from a mammal. Yet, birds have been shown to be remarkably intelligent in a similar way to mammals such as humans and monkeys. Our study demonstrates that by looking at brains that are least like our own, yet still capable of generating intelligent behaviour, we can determine the basic principles governing the way brains work."
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