Want to know how a Japanese person is feeling? Pay attention to the tone of his voice, not his face. That's what other Japanese people would do, anyway. A new study examines how Dutch and Japanese people assess others' emotions and finds that Dutch people pay attention to the facial expression more than Japanese people do.
"As humans are social animals, it's important for humans to understand the emotional state of other people to maintain good relationships," says Akihiro Tanaka of Waseda Institute for Advanced Study in Japan. "When a man is smiling, probably he is happy, and when he is crying, probably he's sad." Most of the research on understanding the emotional state of others has been done on facial expression; Tanaka and his colleagues in Japan and the Netherlands wanted to know how vocal tone and facial expressions work together to give you a sense of someone else's emotion.
For the study, Tanaka and colleagues made a video of actors saying a phrase with a neutral meaning - "Is that so?" - two ways: angrily and happily. This was done in both Japanese and Dutch. Then they edited the videos so that they also had recordings of someone saying the phrase angrily but with a happy face, and happily with an angry face. Volunteers watched the videos in their native language and in the other language and were asked whether the person was happy or angry. They found that Japanese participants paid attention to the voice more than Dutch people did - even when they were instructed to judge the emotion by the faces and to ignore the voice.
John Donvan and Caren Zucker The Atlantic Wed, 15 Sep 2010 15:52 UTC
As new cases of autism have exploded in recent years - some form of the condition affects about one in 110 children today - efforts have multiplied to understand and accommodate the condition in childhood. But children with autism will become adults with autism, some 500,000 of them in this decade alone. What then? Meet Donald Gray Triplett, 77, of Forest, Mississippi. He was the first person ever diagnosed with autism. And his long, happy, surprising life may hold some answers.
In 1951, A Hungarian-born psychologist, mind reader, and hypnotist named Franz Polgar was booked for a single night's performance in a town called Forest, Mississippi, at the time a community of some 3,000 people and no hotel accommodations. Perhaps because of his social position - he went by Dr. Polgar, had appeared in Life magazine, and claimed (falsely) to have been Sigmund Freud's "medical hypnotist" - Polgar was lodged at the home of one of Forest's wealthiest and best-educated couples, who treated the esteemed mentalist as their personal guest.
Polgar's all-knowing, all-seeing act had been mesmerizing audiences in American towns large and small for several years. But that night it was his turn to be dazzled, when he met the couple's older son, Donald, who was then 18. Oddly distant, uninterested in conversation, and awkward in his movements, Donald nevertheless possessed a few advanced faculties of his own, including a flawless ability to name musical notes as they were played on a piano and a genius for multiplying numbers in his head. Polgar tossed out "87 times 23," and Donald, with his eyes closed and not a hint of hesitation, correctly answered "2,001."
Indeed, Donald was something of a local legend. Even people in neighboring towns had heard of the Forest teenager who'd calculated the number of bricks in the facade of the high school - the very building in which Polgar would be performing - merely by glancing at it.
The health effects of corn syrup have been debated, and many Americans now generally believe that corn syrup may not be the best sweetening choice for their health. So what does the Corn Refiners Association do? Well, change the name of course.
The Corn Refiners Association has asked the FDA to rename 'corn syrup' as 'corn sugar'. The renaming may take years to be officially allowed on food labels, but the CRA is already using it in advertising. Here's a link to their BS PR for 'corn sugar'. And wait, here's another. And another (this is a must watch video).
The Corn Refiners Association decided to 'show' high-fructose corn syrup was as safe as sugar. It's no different than the Tobacco industry telling us nicotine isn't addictive.
What they didn't tell you is it's banned in places like Canada and Europe. You can even buy sodas in Mexico without it in since they don't have American lobbyists writing their laws.
If you can't see that they are using the same tactics as the Tobacco Industry used in the past you are completely blind.
If you look at the ingredients of the food you buy, you've probably seen high-fructose corn syrup on the list more times than you can count. Following up on a great new corn syrup post by Jeannie, "Corn Syrup May Get a New Name...Nice Try," and finally catching up on a few articles I've been meaning to write on for awhile, I've create a list of 7 clear reasons to avoid (or even ditch altogether) high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).
High-Fructose Corn Syrup = Evil
Ok, maybe not "evil," since that would require having abilities of discrimination and such. But high-fructose corn syrup is definitely bad for you. If you don't believe me, take a look at this information.
Roald Dahl's Miss Trunchbull or Gillian Cross's Demon Headmaster demonstrate the exercise of power, study finds.
They may be sadistic figures who hate children, but a study suggests that the savage portrayal of headteachers in children's literature possesses a grain of truth and may even be helpful when it comes to training teachers who aspire to lead schools.
Characters like Miss Agatha Trunchbull, from Roald Dahl's Matilda, or the Demon Headmaster, from the sequence by Gillian Cross, can teach children to think about power and how it can be used for malign purposes, Professor Pat Thomson, director of the centre for research in schools and communities at Nottingham University school of education, has found.
The study of 19 fictional headteachers found that nine are portrayed as evil or authoritarian, a further six are remote figures of power, and just one - JK Rowling's Professor Albus Dumbledore - is a positive role model.
London - A woman from a village in southwestern England says that a severe migraine attack left her speaking with what sounds like a French accent - a striking example of a rare syndrome that neuroscientists say can leave lifelong locals sounding like they come from thousands of miles away.
Kay Russell appeared on the BBC earlier this week, speaking in a hesitant, husky voice, drawing out her vowels with an accent which sounded roughly French, or occasionally Eastern European. The broadcaster also showed a video of Russell before the change, in which she speaks to the camera in chirpy southern English accent.
Russell shook her head and smiled sadly as the video played.
"When I see that, I see the person I used to be," the 49-year-old said. "It's not my voice I miss. I would love to have my own voice back, but it goes way, way, way beyond my voice."
It wasn't exactly clear what happened to Russell in January when the migraine attack struck - a number for her could not be located and there was no immediate response to an attempt to reach her through her previous employer. The BBC identified her condition as Foreign Accent Syndrome, known only in a few dozen cases across the world.
With countries around the world taking confusingly different approaches to BPA - some have issued partial bans on it, others maintain it is completely safe - the vexed arguments around BPA may be about to come to a head as European and US food safety regulators look to update their advisories on it and scientists progress the most thorough studies to date into BPA.
The BPA issue occupied part of a fascinating presentation in Auckland today (audio available here) at the New Zealand Food Safety Authority conference, where Queensland University's Professor Gordon Robertson, an expert in food packaging, explained the split in thinking on BPA in the scientific community. Perhaps more importantly, he outlined several food packaging chemicals and techniques - from recycled paper packaging to the ink used on food labels, that don't get the headlines in the same way BPA does, but whose impact on food and human health are poorly understood by the industry creating them and the scientific community in general.
The BPA issue occupied a swathe of the New York Times last week as science writer Denise Grady set out to try and untangle some of the conflicting information out there on BPA. Unfortunately, she isn't able to shed much light on whether Bisphenol-A, a known 'endocrine disruptor' that can mimic the hormone oestrogen, has lasting harmful effects on humans in the small doses it is consumed through us coming into contact with food and liquid that has been stored in bottles containing it.
Plastic liners leach BPA into our food. So why have manufacturers and regulators failed to act?
I'm too lazy a cook not to love cans. Quick, cheap, and recyclable, they've gotten me through many a long, tomatoless winter. Besides, I inherited a kind of a feminist reverence for them - didn't packaged foods help women cast off their domestic chains and all that? But recent research suggests that modern feminists, especially those inclined toward motherhood, might want to think twice before stocking up on Progresso soup.
Peek inside any can and you'll notice a thin film separating your food from the metal. During the 1950s, manufacturers began lining cans with plastic to fend off bacteria that could get into food and drinks if the container corroded. The biggest concern was food-borne botulism, an illness that used to kill six in ten of its victims. Thanks to liners and rigorous sterilization, botulism in commercial canned goods is now pretty rare. Trouble is, most can liners contain bisphenol A (BPA), a chemical that can leach into the food. Last year, the nonprofit Consumers Union found it in 18 of 19 canned foods it tested: Progresso Vegetable Soup topped the list with 22 micrograms of BPA per serving - 116 times Consumers Union's recommended daily limit, which is based on animal studies.
Washington - Antibiotics can temporarily upset your stomach, but now it turns out that repeatedly taking them can trigger long-lasting changes in all those good germs that live in your gut, raising questions about lingering ill effects.
Nobody yet knows if that leads to later health problems. But the finding is the latest in a flurry of research raising questions about how the customized bacterial zoo that thrives in our intestines forms - and whether the wrong type or amount plays a role in ailments from obesity to inflammatory bowel disease to asthma.
Don't be grossed out: This is a story in part about, well, poop. Three healthy adults collected weeks of stool samples so that scientists could count exactly how two separate rounds of a fairly mild antibiotic caused a surprising population shift in their microbial netherworld - as some original families of germs plummeted and other types moved in to fill the gap.
It's also a story of how we coexist with trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes in the skin, the nose, the digestive tract, what scientists call the human microbiome. Many are beneficial, even indispensable, especially the gut bacteria that play an underappreciated role in overall health.
"Gut communities are fundamentally important in the development of our immune system," explains Dr. David Relman of Stanford University, who led the antibiotic study published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Let's not take them for granted."
Even seemingly gentle antibiotics may severely disrupt the balance of microbes living in the gut, with unforeseen health consequences, U.S. researchers reported on Monday.
An intimate study of three women given ciprofloxacin showed the drug suppressed entire populations of beneficial bacteria, and at least one woman took months to recover.
The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supports the common wisdom that antibiotics can damage the "good" germs living in the body.
So preserve yourselves, my brothers, from the calamities of this place, for distinguishing it is extremely difficult! Souls find it sweet, and then within it they are duped, since they become completely enamored of it.
- Sufi proverb
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This article is irrelevant. Hunter Biden was scheduled to be executed through hanging on Friday Oct. 15 at GITMO. Wake Up SOTT.net! [Link]
