June 25, 2009, 6:01 PM CT

More gene mutations linked to autism risk

More pieces in the complex autism inheritance puzzle are emerging in the latest study from a research team including geneticists from The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and several collaborating institutions. This study identified 27 different genetic regions where rare copy number variations missing or extra copies of DNA segments were found in the genes of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs), but not in the healthy controls. The complex combination of multiple genetic duplications and deletions is thought to interfere with gene function, which can disrupt the production of proteins necessary for normal neurological development.

"We focused on changes in the exons of DNAprotein-coding areas in which deletions or duplications are more likely to directly disrupt biological functions," said study leader Hakon Hakonarson, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Applied Genomics at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and associate professor of Pediatrics at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. "We identified additional autism susceptibility genes, a number of of which, as we previously found, belong to the neuronal cell adhesion molecule family involved in the development of brain circuitry in early childhood." He added that the team discovered a number of "private" gene mutations, those found only in one or a few individuals or familiesan indication of genetic complexity, in which a number of different gene changes may contribute to an autism spectrum disorder......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

June 16, 2009, 4:56 AM CT

Why do we choose our mates?

Charles Darwin wrote about it 150 years ago: animals don't pick their mates by pure chance it's a process that is deliberate and involves numerous factors. After decades of examining his work, experts agree that he pretty much scored a scientific bullseye, but a very big question is, "What have we learned since then?" asks a Texas A&M University biologist who has studied Darwin's theories.

Adam Jones, an evolutional biologist who has studied Darwin's work for years, says that Darwin's beliefs about the choice of mates and sexual selection being beyond mere chance have been proven correct, as stated in Darwin's landmark book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. His work has withstood decades of analysis and scrutiny, as Jones states in his paper, "Mate Choice and Sexual Selection: What Have We Learned Since Darwin?" in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Bottom line: It's no accident that certain peahens submit to gloriously-colored male peacocks, that lions get the females of their choice or that humans spend hours primping to catch the perfect spouses it's a condition that is ingrained into all creatures and a conscious "choice" is made between the two so the romantic fireworks can begin.

Jones says Darwin set the standard for original thinking about animal reproduction and was first scientist to propose plausible mechanisms of evolution, and from there he took it one step further he confirmed that animals' mating choices can drive evolutionary change......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

June 11, 2009, 5:11 AM CT

Depressed mood may lead to premature birth

Scientists trying to uncover why premature birth is a growing problem in the United States and one that disproportionately affects black women have observed that pre-pregnancy depressive mood may be a risk factor in preterm birth among both blacks and whites.

Black women, however, have nearly two times the odds of having a preterm birth in comparison to white women, as per Amelia Gavin, a University of Washington assistant professor of social work and main author of a newly released study that appears online in the recent issue of the Journal of Women's Health.

"Preterm births are one of the most significant health disparities in the United States and the overall number of these births increased from 10.6 percent in 2000 to 12.8 percent in 2005," she said.

While there may be some sort of link between giving birth prematurely and depressed mood, the study found no cause and effect, said Gavin, who studies health disparities. She believes the higher preterm birth rate among blacks appears to be the result of declining health over time among black women.

For this study, premature birth referred to any child born after less than 37 weeks of gestation. Normal gestation ranges from 38 to 42 weeks. Data for the study was drawn from a larger longitudinal investigation looking at the risks for cardiovascular disease among more than 5,000 young adults in four metropolitan areas. The Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adults Study also collected information about mental health and pregnancy outcomes. Between 1990 and 1996, 555 women in the larger study gave birth. These women were the subjects in the depression-premature birth study......... Posted by: Emily      Read more         Source

June 1, 2009, 4:55 AM CT

Longer high-stakes tests may result in a sense of mental fatigue

Spending hours taking a high-pressure aptitude test may make people feel mentally fatigued, but that fatigue doesn't necessarily lead to lower test scores, as per new research published by the American Psychological Association. If anything, performance might actually improve on a longer test, the study found.

"The experience of fatigue during testing does not appear to be, in and of itself, detrimental to test performance," said co-authors Phillip Ackerman, PhD, and Ruth Kanfer, PhD.

The study, in the June Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, stemmed from concerns that when taking longer tests over several hours in one sitting, students would feel increasingly fatigued, and, in turn, perform worse. High-stakes tests are typically used for admission to college and to regulated professions such as medicine, law and accounting.

Cognitive fatigue -- a sense of being mentally worn out or exhausted -- is actually only partly determined by the length of the test, as per the research. Some people simply seem to feel it more than others in situations that demand prolonged concentration and mental effort.

In the study, 239 freshman college students from the Atlanta area took three different versions of the SAT Reasoning Test. Under conditions simulating the actual exam, with start times of 8 A.M. on three consecutive Saturdays, the students completed tests specially constructed for three different durations: 3.5, 4.5 and 5.5 hours. (The current SAT is 3.75 hours of testing over a 4.5-hour session. In this study, the short version of the test had one less of the verbal, math and writing sections; the long version had one more of each. Otherwise, the tests were the same.) Students received a cash bonus if they beat their prior SAT scores......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

May 27, 2009, 9:12 PM CT

Risks of Dementia drug treatment

Side effects linked to several commonly-prescribed dementia drugs appears to be putting elderly Canadians at risk, says Queen's University Geriatrics professor Sudeep Gill.

Cholinesterase inhibitors (Aricept, Exelon and Reminyl) are often prescribed for people with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias because they increase the level of a chemical in the brain that seems to help memory. Eventhough such drugs are known to provoke slower heart rates and fainting episodes, the magnitude of these risks has not been clear until now.

"This is very troubling, because the drugs are marketed as helping to preserve memory and improve function," says Dr. Gill, who is an Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-term Care Career Scientist, working at Providence Care's St. Mary's of the Lake Hospital in Kingston. "But for a subset of people, the effect may be the exact opposite."

In a large study using province-wide data, Dr. Gill and colleagues discovered that people who used cholinesterase inhibitors were hospitalized for fainting almost twice as often as people with dementia who did not receive these drugs. Experiencing a slowed heart-rate was 69 per cent more common amongst cholinesterase inhibitor users. In addition, people taking the dementia drugs had a 49 per cent increased chance of having permanent pacemakers implanted and an 18 per cent increased risk of hip fractures......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

May 24, 2009, 8:47 PM CT

Opposites attract: how genetics influences humans

New light has been thrown on how humans choose their partners, a scientist will tell the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics today (Monday May 25). Professor Maria da Graa Bicalho, head of the Immunogenetics and Histocompatibility Laboratory at the University of Parana, Brazil, says that her research had shown that people with diverse major histocompatibility complexes (MHCs) were more likely to choose each other as mates than those whose MHCs were similar, and that this was likely to be an evolutionary strategy to ensure healthy reproduction.

Females' preference for MHC dissimilar mates has been shown in a number of vertebrate species, including humans, and it is also known that MHC influences mating selection by preferences for particular body odours. The Brazilian team has been working in this field since 1998, and decided to investigate mate selection in the Brazilian population, while trying to uncover the biological significance of MHC diversity.

The researchers studied MHC data from 90 married couples, and compared them with 152 randomly-generated control couples. They counted the number of MHC dissimilarities among those who were real couples, and compared them with those in the randomly-generated 'virtual couples'. "If MHC genes did not influence mate selection", says Professor Bicalho, "we would have expected to see similar results from both sets of couples. But we observed that the real partners had significantly more MHC dissimilarities than we could have expected to find simply by chance"......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

May 24, 2009, 8:46 PM CT

Interpreting head movements

May 21, 2009 It is well known that people use head motion during conversation to convey a range of meanings and emotions, and that women use more active head motion when conversing with each other than men use when they talk with each other.

When women and men converse together, the men use a little more head motion and the women use a little less. But the men and women might be adapting because of their gender-based expectations or because of the movements they perceive from each other.

What would happen if you could change the apparent gender of a conversant while keeping all of the motion dynamics of head movement and facial expression?.

Using new videoconferencing technology, a team of psychology experts and computer researchers led by Steven Boker, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia were able to switch the apparent gender of study participants during conversation and observed that head motion was more important than gender in determining how people coordinate with each other while engaging in conversation.

The researchers observed that gender-based social expectations are unlikely to be the source of reported gender differences in the way people coordinate their head movements during two-way conversation.

The scientists used synthesized faces known as avatars in videoconferences with nave participants, who believed they were conversing onscreen with an actual person rather than a synthetic version of a person......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

May 24, 2009, 8:43 PM CT

People by nature are universally optimistic

Despite calamities from economic recessions, wars and famine to a flu epidemic afflicting the Earth, a newly released study from the University of Kansas and Gallup indicates that humans are by nature optimistic.

The study, to be presented Sunday, May 24, 2009, at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science in San Francisco, found optimism to be universal and borderless.

Data from the Gallup World Poll drove the findings, with adults in more than 140 countries providing a representative sample of 95 percent of the world's population. The sample included more than 150,000 adults.

Eighty-nine percent of individuals worldwide expect the next five years to be as good or better than their current life, and 95 percent of individuals expected their life in five years to be as good or better than their life was five years ago.

"These results provide compelling evidence that optimism is a universal phenomenon," said Matthew Gallagher, a psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas and lead researcher of the study.

At the country level, optimism is highest in Ireland, Brazil, Denmark, and New Zealand and lowest in Zimbabwe, Egypt, Haiti and Bulgaria. The United States ranks number 10 on the list of optimistic countries......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

May 5, 2009, 8:38 PM CT

Drinkers Not Only Zone Out But.....

A newly released study out of the University of Pittsburgh suggests that a moderate dose of alcohol increases a person's mind wandering, while at the same time reducing the likelihood of noticing that one's mind has wandered.

The paper, titled "Lost in the Sauce: The Effects of Alcohol on Mind Wandering," explores this phenomenon and is published in this month's issue of "Psychological Science."

The study provides the first evidence that alcohol disrupts an individual's ability to realize his or her mind has wandered, suggesting impairment of a psychological state called meta-consciousness. These findings suggest that distinct processes are responsible for causing a thought to occur, as opposed to allowing its presence to be noticed.

Led by University of Pittsburgh professor of psychology Michael Sayette, scientists Erik Reichle, associate professor and chair of Pitt's cognitive program in psychology, and Jonathan Schooler, professor of psychology at University of California, Santa Barbara, studied a group of men-half of whom had consumed alcohol and half of whom had been given a placebo. After 30 minutes, the participants began reading a portion of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" from a computer screen. If they caught themselves zoning out-having no idea what they had just read or thinking about something other than the text-they pressed a key on the keyboard. They also were prompted at intervals, to see if they could be "caught" mind-wandering before they realized it themselves......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

May 5, 2009, 5:11 AM CT

Possible and actual autism diagnosis

"Timely identification and diagnosis of an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can impact a child's development and is the key to opening the door to the services and therapies available to children with autism," says Paul Shattuck, Ph.D., assistant professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. "Unfortunately, our research shows that the average age of autism diagnosis is nearly six years old, which is three to four years after diagnosis is possible".

Shattuck is the main author of an article on the timing of ASD identification in the current issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

He and co-author of studys used data from 13 sites around the country that were funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to collect information from the health and education records of eight year olds with a wide variety of developmental problems in 2002.

Shattuck's research observed that females were identified later than males and that early diagnosis was commonly associated with a more severe or obvious cognitive impairment. There were no disparities in the age of diagnosis by race when the data are pooled from all 13 sites. However, in further analyses reported elsewhere, Shattuck and his colleagues have observed that Black and Hispanic children who meet diagnostic criteria for autism are much less likely to actually have a documented diagnosis in their records......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

May 4, 2009, 5:08 AM CT

Tthinking about the positive

In a newly released study, cognitive researchers have shown that when aware of both a negative and positive stereotype correlation to performance, women will identify more closely with the positive stereotype, avoiding the harmful impact the negative stereotype unwittingly can have on their performance.

The study, led by Robert J. Rydell, assistant professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University, focused on women and math ability. While studies -- including this one -- have shown that women will perform worse on mathematical tasks if simply made aware of the negative stereotype that women are weaker at math than men, this is the first study to examine the influence of concurrent and competing stereotypes, one negative and one positive.

The study also demonstrates how the negative stereotype encroached on working memory, thus leaving less brain power for the mathematical task at hand. The positive stereotypes had no such effect, however, and when coupled with the negative stereotype erased its drain on working memory.

"This research shows that because people are members of multiple social groups that often have contradictory performance stereotypes (for example, Asian females in the domain of math), making them aware of both a positive group stereotype and a negative stereotype eliminates the threat and underperformance that is commonly seen when they dwell only on their membership in a negatively stereotyped group," Rydell said. "People seem motivated to align themselves with positively stereotyped groups and, as a byproduct, can eliminate the worry, stress and cognitive depletion brought about by negative performance stereotypes, increasing actual performance."........ Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

May 1, 2009, 5:06 AM CT

Maternal depression and sleep disturbance in infants

A study in the May 1 issue of the journal SLEEP suggests that babies born to mothers with depression are more likely to suffer from significant sleep disturbances at 2 weeks postpartum that continue until 6 months of age. Findings of the study are of particular importance, as sleep disturbances in infancy may result in increased risk for developing early-onset depression in childhood.

Results indicate that infants born to mothers with depression had significant sleep disturbances in comparison to low-risk infants; the high-risk group had an hour longer nocturnal sleep latency, shorter sleep episodes and lower sleep efficiency than infants who were born to mothers without depression. Eventhough average sleep time in a 24 hours did not differ by risk group at eight two or four weeks, nocturnal total sleep time was 97 minutes longer in the low-risk group at both recording periods. High-risk infants also had significantly more daytime sleep episodes of a shorter average duration.

Prior studies have observed that levels of cortisol, a hormone that is linked to stress, is increased during pregnancy and after delivery in depressed mothers, indicating that the mother's hormone level may affect the infant's sleep.

As per the main author, Roseanne Armitage, PhD, director of the Sleep and Chronophysiology Laboratory at the University Of Michigan Depression Center, while maternal depression does have a negative effect on infants' sleep, the damage appears to be reversible......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

April 29, 2009, 5:29 AM CT

Accumulation of visceral fat and depression

Numerous studies have shown that depression is linked to an increased risk of heart disease, but exactly how has never been clear.

Now, scientists at Rush University Medical Center have shown that depression is linked with the accumulation of visceral fat, the kind of fat packed between internal organs at the waistline, which has long been known to increase the risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

The study is posted online and would be reported in the recent issue of Psychosomatic Medicine

"Our results suggest that central adiposity which is usually called belly fat is an important pathway by which depression contributes to the risk for cardiovascular disease and diabetes," said Lynda Powell, PhD, chairperson of the Department of Preventive Medicine at Rush and the study's principal investigator. "In our study, depressive symptoms were clearly correlation to deposits of visceral fat, which is the type of fat involved in disease".

The study included 409 middle-aged women, about half African-American and half Caucasian, who were participating in the Women in the South Side Health Project (WISH) in Chicago, a longitudinal study of the menopausal transition. Depressive symptoms were assessed using a common screening test, and visceral fat measured with a Computerized axial tomography scan. Eventhough waist size is often used as a proxy for the amount of visceral fat, it is an inaccurate measure because it includes subcutaneous fat, or fat deposited just beneath the skin......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

April 28, 2009, 5:17 AM CT

Psychological effects of inadequate sleep

A recent Finnish study suggests that children's short sleep duration even without sleeping difficulties increases the risk for behavioral symptoms of ADHD.

During the recent decades, sleep duration has decreased in a number of countries; in the United States a third of children are estimated to suffer from inadequate sleep. It has been hypothesised that sleep deprivation may manifest in children as behavioral symptoms rather than as tiredness, but only few studies have investigated this hypothesis.

The scientists at the University of Helsinki and National Institute of Health and Welfare, Finland, examined whether decreased sleep leads to behavioral problems similar to those exhibited by children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

280 healthy children (146 girls and 134 boys) took part in the study.

The scientists tracked the children's sleep using parental reporting as well as actigraphs, or devices worn on the wrist to monitor sleep.

The children whose average sleep duration as measured by actigraphs was shorter than 7.7 hours had a higher hyperactivity and impulsivity score and a higher ADHD total score, but similar inattention score than those sleeping for a longer time. In multivariate statistical models, short sleep duration remained a statistically significant predictor of hyperactivity and impulsivity, and sleeping difficulties were linked to hyperactivity, impulsivity and inattention. There were no significant interactions between short sleep and sleeping difficulties......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

April 24, 2009, 5:05 AM CT

How cigarettes calm you down

The calming neurological effects of nicotine have been demonstrated in a group of non-smokers during anger provocation. Scientists writing in BioMed Central's open access journal Behavioral and Brain Functions suggest that nicotine may alter the activity of brain areas that are involved in the inhibition of negative emotions such as anger.

Jean Gehricke led a team of scientists from the University of California who studied the effect of nicotine patches on the subjects' tendency to retaliate in response to anger provocation. The subjects played a computer game and could see a video screen of another player who they thought to betheir opponent, although, in fact, they were playing alone. After each round, the victor could give his opponent a burst of unpleasant noise at a duration and volume set by the winner. In some of the subjects, nicotine was linked to a reduced tendency to retaliate, even after provocation by the 'opponent'.

As per Gehricke, "Participants who showed nicotine-induced changes in anger task performance also showed changes in brain metabolism. Nicotine-induced reductions in length of retaliation were linked to changes in brain metabolism in response to nicotine in brain areas responsible for orienting, planning and processing of emotional stimuli"......... Posted by: Daniel      Read more         Source

April 22, 2009, 5:16 AM CT

Think memory worsens with age?

Thinking your memory will get worse as you get older may actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Scientists at North Carolina State University have observed that senior citizens who think older people should perform poorly on tests of memory actually score much worse than seniors who do not buy in to negative stereotypes about aging and memory loss.

As per a research findings published earlier this month, psychology professor Dr. Tom Hess and a team of scientists from NC State show that elderly adults' ability to remember suffers when negative stereotypes are "activated" in a given situation. "For example, elderly adults will perform more poorly on a memory test if they are told that older folks do poorly on that particular type of memory test," Hess says. Memory also suffers if senior citizens believe they are being "stigmatized," meaning that others are looking down on them because of their age.

"Such situations appears to be a part of elderly adults' everyday experience," Hess says, "such as being concerned about what others think of them at work having a negative effect on their performance and thus potentially reinforcing the negative stereotypes." However, Hess adds, "The positive flip side of this is that those who do not feel stigmatized, or those in situations where more positive views of aging are activated, exhibit significantly higher levels of memory performance." In other words, if you are confident that aging will not ravage your memory, you are more likely to perform well on memory-related tasks......... Posted by: Daniel      Read more         Source

April 21, 2009, 5:28 AM CT

We're all pot heads deep inside

U.S. and Brazilian researchers have just proven that one of Bob Dylan's most famous lines"everybody must get stoned" is correct. That's because they've discovered that the brain manufactures proteins that act like marijuana at specific receptors in the brain itself. This discovery, published online in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), may lead to new marijuana-like drugs for managing pain, stimulating appetite, and preventing marijuana abuse.

"Ideally, this development will lead to drugs that bind to and activate the THC receptor, but are devoid of the side effects that limit the usefulness of marijuana," said Lakshmi A. Devi of the Department of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and one of the senior scientists involved in the study. "It would be helpful to have a drug that activated or blocked the THC receptor, and our findings raise the possibility that this will lead to effective drugs with fewer side effects".

Researchers made their discovery by first extracting several small proteins, called peptides, from the brains of mice and determining their amino acid sequence. The extracted proteins were then compared with another peptide previously known to bind to, but not activate, the receptor (THC) affected by marijuana. Out of the extracted proteins, several not only bound to the brain's THC receptors, but activated them as well......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

April 21, 2009, 5:16 AM CT

How does lithium work in bipolar disease?

Lithium has been established for more than 50 years as one of the most effective therapys for bipolar mood disorder.

However, researchers have never been entirely sure exactly how it operates in the human brain.

Now, new research from Cardiff University researchers suggests a mechanism for how Lithium works, opening the door for potentially more effective therapys.

Laboratory tests on cells have shown that Lithium affects a molecule called PIP3 that is important in controlling brain cell signalling. Lithium suppresses the production of inositol, a simple sugar from which PIP3 is made.

Lithium inhibits inositol monophosphatase (IMPase) an enzyme mandatory for making inositol. Importantly, this research shows that increasing the amount of IMPase causes higher levels of PIP3. This can then be reduced by lithium therapy.

High levels of IMPA2, a gene for a variant of IMPase, has previously been associated with bipolar mood disorder. This new result suggests that Lithium could counteract the changes in IMPA2.

Professor Adrian Harwood of Cardiff School of Biosciences, who led the research, said: "We still cannot say definitively how Lithium can help stabilise bipolar disorder. However, our research does suggest a possible pathway for its operation. By better understanding Lithium, we can learn about the genetics of bipolar disorder and develop more potent and selective drugs......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

April 15, 2009, 5:12 AM CT

Sleeplessness leads to increased cancer pain

A study in the April 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine suggests that sleep problems lead to increased pain and fatigue in cancer patients. The results indicate that interventions aimed at trouble sleeping would be expected to improve both pain and fatigue in this patient population.

Results show that more than half the sample reported having trouble sleeping, with 26 percent reporting moderate or severe trouble sleeping. Compared with patients who reported no trouble sleeping, patients with moderate to severe trouble sleeping reported significantly more fatigue, pain and depressed mood. Using structural equation modeling analysis to evaluate causal relations and directions of effect, the best-fitting model indicates that trouble sleeping led to increased ratings of pain.

As per the authors, the relationship between pain and sleep often has been assumed to be reciprocal. In the present study, however, a model of reciprocal causation could not be fit to the data, and models in which pain caused trouble sleeping did not fit as well as the model in which trouble sleeping caused pain.

"We believed we would find a bi-directional relationship between insomnia and pain, but instead observed that trouble sleeping was more likely a cause, rather than a consequence, of pain in patients with cancer," said main author Edward J. Stepanski, chief operational officer at the Accelerated Community Oncology Research Network in Memphis, Tenn......... Posted by: Janet      Read more         Source

April 15, 2009, 5:10 AM CT

Melatonin for sleep problems in children with autism

Westchester, Ill. - A study in the April 15 issue of the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine determined that over-the-counter melatonin medicine can shorted the length of time it takes for children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD), Fragile X Syndrome (FXS), or both to fall asleep at the beginning of the night.

Results of the study indicated that children who received over-the-counter melatonin therapys experienced significant improvements in total night sleep durations, sleep latency times, and sleep-onset times. Mean sleep duration was longer on melatonin than placebo by 21 minutes, sleep-onset latency was shorter by 28 minutes and sleep-onset time was earlier by 42 minutes.

As per the senior author, Beth L. Goodlin-Jones, PhD of the M.I.N.D Institute at the University of California Davis Health System in Sacramento, Calif., therapy with over-the-counter melatonin supplements benefits children of all ages, which helps alleviate some of the additional stress that parents of special-needs children experience.

"Sleep onset problems at the beginning of the night are very troublesome for children and their families," said Goodlin-Jones. "Sometimes children may take one to two hours to fall asleep and often they disrupt the household during this time."........ Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

April 8, 2009, 5:19 AM CT

Love at first sight?

Leave it to geneticists to answer a question that haccording toplexed humanity since the dawn of time: does love at first sight truly exist? As per a research studyreported in the April 2009 issue of the journal GENETICS (http://www.genetics.org), a team of researchers from the United States and Australia discovered that at the genetic level, some males and females are more compatible than others, and that this compatibility plays an important role in mate selection, mating outcomes, and future reproductive behaviors. In experiments involving fruit flies, the scientists observed that before mating, females experience what amounts to "genetic priming," making them more likely to mate with certain males over others.

"Our research helps to shed light on the complex biochemistry involved in mate selection and reproduction," said Mariana Wolfner, Professor of Developmental Biology at Cornell University and the senior scientist involved in the study. "These findings may lead to ways to curb unwanted insect populations by activating or deactivating genes that play a role in female mating decisions," she added.

To reach their conclusions, researchers mated two different strains of fruit fly females to males either from their own strain or to males from the other strain. They noted the males with which females of each strain tended to mate and then examined whether the females showed differences in behavior soon after mating and in reproduction-related activities, such as how a number of offspring were produced and how a number of sperm were stored. They also examined the females' RNA to compare the genes expressed in females mated to males of different strains. They observed that despite observed differences in mating behaviors and reproduction activities in females mated to different strains of males, there were only negligible mating-dependent differences in gene expression between the groups. This suggests that genetic changes involved in mate choice and reproduction were in place before mating began......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

April 6, 2009, 9:34 PM CT

You Wear Me Out

Exerting self-control is exhausting. In fact, using self-control in one situation impairs our ability to use self-control in subsequent, even unrelated, situations. What about thinking of other people exerting self-control? Earlier research has shown that imagining actions can cause the same reactions as if we were actually performing them (e.g., simulating eating a disgusting food results in a revolting face, even if no food has been eaten) and psychology experts Joshua M. Ackerman and John A. Bargh from Yale University, along with Noah J. Goldstein and Jenessa R. Shapiro from the University of California, Los Angeles explored what affect thinking about other people's self-control has on our own thoughts and behavior.

Participants were presented with a story about a hungry waiter who was surrounded by delicious food, but was not allowed to sample any, for fear of being fired. Half of the participants simply read the story and the other half were told to imagine themselves in the waiter's shoes. Next, all of the participants were shown images of mid- to high-priced items (e.g., cars and TVs) and were to indicate how much they would pay for them. In a follow-up experiment, some of the participants read the same story and others read a similar story in which the waiter was not hungry and did not have to use self-control. Just as in the first experiment, some of the participants read the story while others imagined themselves as the waiter. All of these volunteers then participated in a word game and a memory task......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source

April 6, 2009, 8:09 PM CT

Stress management improves mood

Brief stress management sessions previous to and immediately after surgery may have both short- and long-term benefit for men undergoing a radical prostatectomy for early-stage prostate cancer, as per research from The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center.

The study, in the current issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology, is the first to examine the benefits of psychosocial intervention for patients with prostate cancer previous to surgery. It observed that men who participated in the sessions experienced less short-term mood disturbance and better long-term quality of life, in comparison to patients who had the procedure but did not have any behavioral intervention.

Most psychosocial interventions in cancer of any type have been studied after patients have completed surgery, explained Lorenzo Cohen, Ph.D., the study's senior author and professor in M. D. Anderson's Departments of Behavioral Science and General Oncology, and director of the Integrative Medicine Program.

"We know that for men with early-stage prostate cancer, the time when they are making therapy decisions is very stressful," said Cohen. "A radical prostatectomy is not without possible, very personal, consequences, including urinary incontinence and erectile dysfunction. Patients may also be worried about the uncertainty that the surgery will cure their cancer......... Posted by: JoAnn      Read more         Source