Health & Wellness
"It's kind of striking that an angry facial expression is consciously valued as a very negative signal by almost everyone, yet at a non-conscious level can be like a tasty morsel that some people will vigorously work for," said Oliver Schultheiss, University of Michigan associate professor of psychology.
His study may explain why some people like to tease each other, he said.
Menu Foods said Saturday it is recalling dog food sold under 46 brands and cat food sold under 37 brands and distributed throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico. The pet foods were sold by major retailers, including Wal-Mart, Kroger and Safeway.
The decision came after the Mount Desert Water District said studies conducted during the past few years call into question the safety of fluoridation. The vote in last week's referendum was 229-to-42 to remove fluoride.
The recall totals more than 2.8 million pounds of chicken.
In the March 15 issue of Neuron, the research team provides the first human evidence for a two-stage model of how a person learns to place objects into categories discerning, for example, that a green apple, and not a green tennis ball, belongs to "food." They describe it as a complex interplay between neurons that process stimulus shape ("bottom-up") and more sophisticated brain areas that discriminate between these shapes to categorize and "label" that information ("top-down").
However, a new study from Current Anthropology challenges this assumption, comparing biological and cultural indicators of schizophrenia in urban, Western societies with study data from the island of Palau, which has one of the highest rates of schizophrenia diagnosis in the world today.
"A 1% average worldwide population prevalence of schizophrenia is routinely interpreted in the medical literature as implying a uniform distribution," write Roger J. Sullivan (California State University, Sacramento), John S. Allen (University of Southern California), and Karen L. Nero (University of Canterbury, New Zealand). "In this sense, the 1% figure is a myth that conceals considerable variability in actual prevalence between settings."
And, the scientific analysis showed that the key to forming opinions lay in how well people can communicate with each other.
As a part of their experiment, researchers led by physicist Renaud Lambiotte of the University of Liege in Belgium used two groups of people.
After initially isolating the two groups from each other, they were gradually brought into contact.
The researchers found that though initially the two groups continued to form opinions independently, when communication gradually increased between them, the final opinions of the two groups were always identical.