(from http://www.thelocal.de/sci-tech/20100908-29685.html)
Looking to get lucky on the dance floor? German scientists have found men who dance vigorously with a fast-moving right knee and large, varied movements of their neck and torso are more attractive to women.

The discovery, which should get some shy shufflers moving with reckless abandon, was announced Wednesday by researchers from the University of Göttingen and colleagues from Britain’s Northumbria University.

A supple neck and torso, exercised by energetic movements, along with a high-tempo right knee and strong varied movement of the left shoulder and wrist were the key indicators that push women’s buttons when a man is on the dance floor.

The researchers believe that these movements send signals about a man’s reproductive strength by conveying health, liveliness and physical strength.

Previous studies had shown that women found men with physically strong dancing styles attractive and judged such men to be assertive, said Bernhard Fink, a behavioural scientist from Göttingen who was part of the research team.

The new study was further evidence “that dance conveys signals about a man that are decisive in partner selection,” Fink said.

The research team used a 3-D camera system to film 19 men aged 18 to 35 who danced to a basic rhythm. The moves were then mapped onto computer simulations, so-called “avatars” that had neither faces, nor distinct body qualities – removing the possibility that women were drawn to the men’s physical features.

Thirty-nine women watched the virtual dancers and assessed the quality of their dancing.

British psychologist Nick Neave, who also took part in the study, said: “This is the first study to show objectively what differentiates a good dancer from a bad one. Men all over the world will be interested to know what moves they can throw to attract women.

“We now know which area of the body females are looking at when they are making a judgement about male dance attractiveness. If a man knows what the key moves are, he can get some training and improve his chances of attracting a female through his dance style.”

The researchers now plan to use the same method for a reverse study to see what effects female dancing has on men. Their findings were published this week in Britain’s Royal Society Journal Biology Letters.

Study finds TV bad for baby brain development
From correspondents in Washington, Agence France-Presse, June 02, 2009 09:52am
(from news.com.au)

Having the television on constantly in a household with infants and toddlers is bad for brain and language development, a US study claims.

The study claims the constant television noise reduces the number of words kids hear and say.

It found that for every hour that the television is on with the volume turned up in a household with small children, the children heard between 500 to a thousand fewer words from adults.

“Audible television clearly reduces speech for both infants and their caregivers within the home and this is potentially harmful for babies’ development,” University of Washington professor of pediatrics Dimitri Christakis said.

“Adults typically utter approximately 941 words per hour.

“Our study found that adult words are almost completely eliminated when television is audible to the child.

“These results may explain the association between infant television exposure and delayed language development.”

Constant exposure to television could also explain attentional and cognitive delays in children, he said, since language development is believed to be key in brain development in early childhood.

For the study, 329 children ranging in age from two months to four years wore special vests with a chest pocket that held a small digital recorder.

The children wore the vests on random days for up to two years.

The recorder captured everything the child said and heard during continuous 12- to 16-hour periods, and was only removed when the child napped or slept, was bathed or went for a ride in the car.

When the researchers counted the number of words uttered by adults and vocalisations by children, as well as vocal interactions between grown-ups and kids, they found that having the telly on resulted in significant reductions in all speech, regardless of whether it was being actively watched or just on in the background.

“Television is not only a poor caregiver substitute, but it actually reduces the number of language sounds and words babies hear, vocalise and therefore learn,” Dr Christakis said.

“We are increasingly technologising infancy, which may prove harmful to the next generation of adults.”

The study was published in the June issue of the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

How your friends’ friends can affect your mood
30 December 2008 by Michael Bond
(from New Scientist Magazine issue 2689)

IF YOU live in the northern hemisphere, this is probably not your favourite month. January tends to dispirit people more than any other. We all know why: foul weather, post-Christmas debt, the long wait before your next holiday, quarterly bills, dark evenings and dark mornings. At least, that is the way it seems. For while all these things might contribute to the way you feel, there is one crucial factor you probably have not accounted for: the state of mind of your friends and relatives. Recent research shows that our moods are far more strongly influenced by those around us than we tend to think. Not only that, we are also beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends – people three degrees of separation away from us who we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus.

Indeed, it is becoming clear that a whole range of phenomena are transmitted through networks of friends in ways that are not entirely understood: happiness and depression, obesity, drinking and smoking habits, ill-health, the inclination to turn out and vote in elections, a taste for certain music or food, a preference for online privacy, even the tendency to attempt or think about suicide. They ripple through networks “like pebbles thrown into a pond”, says Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has pioneered much of the new work.

At first sight, the idea that we can catch the moods, habits and state of health not only of those around us, but also those we do not even know seems alarming. It implies that rather than being in charge of where we are going in life, we are little more than back-seat drivers, since most social influence operates at a subconscious level.

But we need not be alarmed, says Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia University, New York. “Social influence is mostly a good thing. We should embrace the fact that we’re inherently social creatures and that much of who we are and what we do is determined by forces that are outside the little circle we draw around ourselves.” What’s more, by being aware of the effects of social contagion we may be able to find ways to counter it, or use it to our own benefit. “There’s no doubt people can have some control over their networks and that this in turn can affect their lives,” says Christakis.

To get an idea of what is going on, take Christakis’s findings on the spread of happiness, which were published last month. His team looked at a network of several thousand friends, relatives, neighbours and work colleagues who form part of the Framingham Heart Study, an ongoing multi-generational epidemiological survey that has tracked risk factors in cardiovascular disease among residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, since 1948. They found that happy people tend to be clustered together, not because they naturally orientate towards each other, but because of the way happiness spreads through social contact over time, regardless of people’s conscious choice of friends (BMJ, DOI: 10.1136/bmj.a2338).

Christakis also found that a person’s happiness is dependent not only on the happiness of an immediate friend but – to a lesser degree – on the happiness of their friend’s friend, and their friend’s friend’s friend. Furthermore, someone’s chances of being happy increase the better connected they are to happy people, and for that matter the better connected their friends and family. “Most people will not be surprised that people with more friends are happier, but what really matters is whether those friends are happy,” says Christakis.

Happiness is near

They also discovered that the effect is not the same with everyone you know. How susceptible you are to someone else’s happiness depends on the nature of your relationship with them. For example, if a good friend who lives within a couple of kilometres of you suddenly becomes happy, that increases the chances of you becoming happy by more than 60 per cent. In contrast, for a next-door neighbour the figure drops to about half that, and for a nearby sibling about half again. Surprisingly, a cohabiting partner makes a difference of less than 10 per cent, which coincides with another peculiar observation about some social epidemics: that they spread far more effectively via friends of the same gender.

All this poses a key question: how can something like happiness be contagious? Some researchers think one of the most likely mechanisms is empathetic mimicry. Psychologists have shown that people unconsciously copy the facial expressions, manner of speech, posture, body language and other behaviours of those around them, often with remarkable speed and accuracy. This then causes them, through a kind of neural feedback, to actually experience the emotions associated with the particular behaviour they are mimicking.
Actions and feelings can be as contagious as a virus

Barbara Wild and her colleagues at the University of Tübingen, Germany, have found that the stronger the facial expression, the stronger the emotion experienced by the person observing it (Psychiatry Research, vol 102, p 109). She believes this process is hard-wired, since it acts so rapidly and automatically.

Others have suggested it works through the action of mirror neurons, a type of brain cell thought to fire both when we perform an action and when we watch someone else doing it, though it is not clear whether the mimicking would cause the neurons to fire or whether their firing would trigger the mimicry. What is clear is that unconscious imitation allows people to “feel a pale reflection of their companions’ actual emotions” and even “feel themselves into the emotional lives of others”, says Elaine Hatfield at the University of Hawaii, Honolulu, whose review of the latest research will appear next April in The Social Neuroscience of Empathy.

There is plenty of evidence for emotional contagion outside the lab. In 2000, Peter Totterdell at the University of Sheffield, UK, found a significant association between the happiness of professional cricketers during a match and the average happiness of their teammates, regardless of other factors such as whether the match was going in the team’s favour (Journal of Applied Psychology, vol 85, p 848). He found a similar effect among nurses and office workers. It has also been shown that if a college student suffers from mild depression their roommate will become progressively more depressed the longer they live with them, and that emotional displays by bank employees have a direct impact on the moods of their customers.

We can see, then, how a phenomenon such as happiness might pass quickly through a social network and infect clusters of friends and relatives. What none of these studies explains, however, is why the strength of the infection varies according to who is passing it to whom. Why are we so much more strongly affected by the happiness of a nearby friend than a nearby sibling? Why does a next-door neighbour have a significant impact, yet someone living a few tens of metres away on the same block have none?

The power of strangers

Two factors appear crucial: the frequency of social contact, and the strength of the relationship. This is not too surprising: we know that emotional contagion requires physical proximity. It is also likely that the closer we feel to someone, the more empathetic we are towards them, and the more likely we are to catch their emotional state. However, how these two factors play out in day-to-day interactions is uncertain. What is also unclear – because it has never been properly tested – is the extent to which emotions can propagate through virtual networks, where the opportunity for physiological mimicry is much reduced.

So much for emotions – what about other phenomena that we unwittingly pick up, and pass on, through our social networks? In 2007, Christakis’s team, again tracking members of the Framingham Heart Study, found that obesity is transmitted in a similar way to happiness. Your risk of gaining weight increases significantly when your friends gain weight, and it is also affected by the weight of people beyond your social horizon. “Obesity appears to spread through social ties,” Christakis says. Again, how likely you are to catch it depends on who you are interacting with: after controlling for factors such as difference in socioeconomic status, the researchers found that an individual’s chances of becoming obese increased by 57 per cent if one of their friends became obese, 40 per cent if a sibling did and 37 per cent if their spouse did, irrespective of age (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 357, p 370).

However, neighbours have no influence, and how far away you live from a friend counts for little, which implies that obesity spreads via a different mechanism to happiness. Rather than behavioural mimicry, the key appears to be the adoption of social norms. In other words, as I see my friends gain weight, this changes my idea of what an acceptable weight is. One similarity with happiness is that friends and relatives have a far greater influence if they are of the same gender. While it is not evident why that should matter for emotional contagion, norms of body size are clearly gender-specific: “Women look at other women, men look at other men,” says Christakis. This could also help explain the epidemics of eating disorders reported among groups of schoolgirls in recent decades.

The spread of a social norm appears to account for another of Christakis’s findings: that when people stop smoking, they usually do so along with whole clusters of friends, relatives and social contacts. As more people quit, it becomes the socially acceptable thing to do, and those who choose to continue smoking are pushed to the periphery of the network. In this case, people are most strongly influenced by those closest to them – if your spouse quits, it is 67 per cent more likely that you will too. Your work colleagues can also have an effect, particularly if you are in a small, close-knit workplace; and more highly educated friends influence one another more than less educated (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 358, p 2249).

Happiness, obesity, smoking habits – activities that we traditionally think of as shaped by individual circumstances, turn out to be ruled to a large degree by social forces. Many other day-to-day phenomena fit a similar pattern, often counter-intuitively. Take autism: Peter Bearman at the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University who in 2004 uncovered a link between suicidal behaviour and certain friendship patterns (American Journal of Public Health, vol 94, p 89), is looking at whether the recent rise in the diagnosis of autism is in any way socially determined. His study is ongoing, but he says his findings could be “explosive”. “It is likely that if you have an autistic child in your community the probability of your child being diagnosed with autism is significantly higher.”
Happiness, obesity, smoking habits – all turn out to be ruled to a large degree by social forces

Why three degrees?

While the mechanism of social contagion varies depending on the phenomenon being spread, in many cases the dynamics are very similar. For example, Christakis has found that with happiness, obesity and smoking habits, the effect of other people’s behaviour carries to three degrees of separation and no further. He speculates that this could be the case with most or perhaps all transmissible traits. Why three degrees? One theory is that friendship networks are inherently unstable because peripheral friends tend to drop away. “While your friends are likely to be the same a year from now, your friends of friends of friends of friends are likely to be entirely different people,” says Christakis.

This poses the question: what shapes the architecture of our social networks and our position in them? Clearly, many factors contribute: where we live, where we work, family size, education, religion, income, our interests, and our tendency to gravitate towards people similar to us. New research by Christakis’s team, due to be published in the next few weeks, suggests there is also a strong genetic component. The study compared the social networks of identical and fraternal twins, and found that identical twins had significantly more similar social networks than fraternal twins, suggesting the structure of your social network is influenced by your genes. That may not sound remarkable, since personality traits such as gregariousness and shyness clearly play a role in determining how connected we are. But there is much more to it, says Christakis. “It’s not just about having a genetic predilection to be friends with a lot of people, it’s about having a genetic predilection to be friends with a lot of popular people. That’s mysterious: how could our genes determine our actual location in this socio-topological space?”

Answering that should help us understand more about the “collective intelligence” of social networks, which some researchers liken to the flocking of birds – the decision to quit smoking, for example, is no more an isolated move than the decision by a bird in a flock to fly to the left.

Sociologists and others are using mathematical models to test these dynamics to try to understand better what triggers the spread of behaviours. Duncan Watts at Columbia University has shown that seeding localised social groups with certain ideas or behaviours can lead to the ideas cascading across entire global networks. This contradicts the notion – promoted by the author Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point and others – that social epidemics depend on a few key influential individuals from whom everyone else takes their cue. It doesn’t ring true, argues Watts, because such “influentials” typically interact with only a few people. The key for the spread of anything, he says, from happiness to the preference for a particular song, is a critical mass of interconnected individuals who influence one another.

Is there any way to mitigate the effects of such powerful and pervasive social forces? It is unlikely we can ever escape social influence entirely, even if we wanted to. “Even when you’re aware of it, you’re probably susceptible,” says Watts. Still, being aware can help, especially when we are seeking to avoid undesirable behaviours or adopt positive habits. We can be choosy about new friends, seeking out people whose lifestyles we aspire to: if you want to lose weight, for example, join a running club and – most importantly – socialise with its members.

Actually cutting ties with old friends might be a bit drastic, though perhaps spending less time with those whose traits we do not wish to share would be a good idea – lazy people, perhaps, or those inclined to negative thinking. And beware those who hang out with such people even if they do not display their views or behaviours – remember the three degrees of contagion rule. Finally, if you really cannot avoid spending time with certain people whose behaviours or emotional state you would rather not take on board (certain relatives at family gatherings, perhaps), you could always try repressing your natural inclination to mimic their body language and facial expressions, and so limit the contagion effect – though be prepared for them to instinctively cool towards you as a result.

What this game plan amounts to is a kind of subtle social reorientation. We will always be vulnerable to what those around us are doing, so as far as possible make sure you are with the right people. Remember the new adage: we are who we hang out with.

Five tips for a healthier social network

1. Choose your friends carefully.
2. Choose which of your existing friends you spend the most time with. For example, hang out with people who are upbeat, or avoid couch potatoes.
3. Join a club whose members you would like to emulate (running, healthy cooking), and socialise with them.
4. If you are with people whose emotional state or behaviours you could do without, try to avoid the natural inclination to mimic their facial expressions and postures.
5. Be aware at all times of your susceptibility to social influence – and remember that being a social animal is mostly a good thing.

Article link here

During the earlier years of life (0~25), the lives of males and females are the generally same – until they get married and start having children. In most cases, women would need to take time off work to take care of their children, whereas men can (or need to) continue working. Depending on whether the woman is career-focused or not, needing to take time off may affect her general “life satisfaction” – as if something’s missing in her life. Even if she loves her family, she may find that 90% of her time now needs to be devoted to her children. The difference in priorities and time allocation may affect her perceived quality of life.

The article below explains more on this.

Gender: Women End Up Unhappier Than Men
(from MEDICA.de)

Less able to achieve their life goals, women end up unhappier than men later in life – even though they start out happier, new research reveals.
31/07/2008

The study used nationally representative data spanning several decades to examine the role of unfulfilled desires in a person’s sense of well-being. Thus, it covers expectations of success and demographic compositions of different generations.

In their analysis, the researchers control for birth cohort and demographic characteristics such as race and education. They find that women are, on average, happier than men in early adulthood – but the glow wears off with time. Specifically, after the age of 48, men’s overall happiness exceeds women’s happiness.

These gender patterns of overall happiness correlate to patterns in two significant aspects of life satisfaction: family and finances. In later life, it is men who come closer to fulfilling their aspirations and, thus, are happier.

Women and men have fairly similar life goals when it comes to love, the study reveals. Nine out of ten people of both genders reach adult life wanting a happy marriage. The saddest period of the average man’s life –when he is in his 20’s– is also the period when he is most likely to be single.

Young men are also more dissatisfied than young women with their financial situations, not because they are worse off, but because they want more and therefore experience a greater “shortfall,” the researchers say. But age alters many things: after 34, men are more likely to be married than women, and the gap only widens with age, mirroring men’s growing satisfaction with family life.

Men also become more satisfied with their financial situations over time, as reflected in their increased spending power. The researchers found that men tend to covet big-ticket items that might not be within reach until later in life, such as a car or vacation home.

The researchers conclude: one surely does not have to be married to be happy, but if that is what a person really wants – and, according to their study, it is for most people – then the failure to attain it can have an impact on the overall happiness. Additionally, they say, those in a relationship tend to be in a stronger financial position than those who must depend solely on their own resources.

MEDICA.de; Source: University of Southern California

When it comes to risk for a heart attack, having excess fat around the heart may be worse than having a high body mass index or a thick waist, according to researchers.
30/07/2008

The study was among the first to explore whether there is a link between fat deposits around the heart, known as pericardial fat, and the development of hard, calcified plaque in the arteries. Calcified plaque itself is not considered risky, but it is associated with the presence of less stable fatty deposits that can lead to heart attack and stroke.

“The distribution of body fat may be as important as the amount of body fat in determining risk of heart attacks,” said Jingzhong Ding, M.D., lead author and an assistant professor of gerontology from Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center. “Even a thin person can have fat around the heart.” The researchers examined data from the Multi-ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA), a $68 million study involving 6,800 participants nationwide, to explore their hypothesis that fat around the arteries in the heart contributes to inflammation and to increased risk of fatty deposits in the vessels.

For the analysis, the researchers measured the volume of pericardial fat in 159 study participants who were 55 to 74 years old. Calcified coronary plaque was observed in 58 percent of participants. Participants were divided into four groups based on the volume of pericardial fat. Those in the group with the highest levels of fat were almost five times (4.65) more likely to have calcified coronary plaque.

The scientists found that while the volume of pericardial fat was related to levels of calcified coronary plaque, body mass index and waist circumference were not related. “Our findings suggest that local fat deposits, rather than total body fat, are most related to calcified coronary plaque,” said Ding. “Inflammatory mediators released from pericardial fat may promote inflammation in local coronary arteries and lead to coronary atherosclerosis.”

MEDICA.de; Source: Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center

Brain: Autism’s Social Struggle Explained
(from MEDICA.de)

According to a new study inefficient pathways for transmitting information between certain brain regions are to blame for the difficulties of people with autism to determine another person’s intentions in a social interaction.
24/07/2008

Picking up on innuendo and social cues is a central part of engaging in conversation, but people with autism often struggle to do so. The study sheds light on the neural mechanisms that are responsible for such social difficulties in autism.

The research implicates abnormalities in the brain’s inter-regional communication system. “The communication between the frontal and posterior areas of the social brain network is impaired in autism, making it difficult to understand the intentions of others” said the study’s senior author Marcel Just.

To measure the effectiveness of the Theory of Mind (ToM) network, that is responsible for processing the intentions and thoughts of others, the researchers asked twelve high-functioning autistic adults and twelve control participants to view animations of interacting geometric figures.

Participants were asked to choose the word that best described the interaction. For example, a large triangle would nudge a small triangle to move outside its enclosure, and the correct word choice would be “persuading”. The control subjects were consistently better at inferring the intention from the action than the other group.

While the study participants were performing the task, the researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure activation levels in all of the cortical areas that compose the ToM network. They simultaneously examined activation levels in several frontal and posterior brain regions. The synchronisation level in the network was reliably lower in the group with autism.

Furthermore, the autistic participants’ brains showed much lower activation levels in the frontal regions. These measures of brain activity in autism were correlated with how well each autism participant performed in the Happe’s Strange Story Test – a pencil-and-paper assessment on the understanding of non-literal statements, such as figures of speech.

MEDICA.de; Source: Carnegie Mellon University